Haven’t you heard? The 2024 election, which will now almost certainly pit President Joe Biden against Donald Trump, will be the ”Rematch that nobody wants.” And so you don’t forget, the media keeps pulling out all the stops to remind you of that fact—again and again and again.
Pundits are quick to supply the reason for this. Trump’s enormous baggage, of course, is a potentially fatal liability. His problems and unfitness have been blatantly on display ad nauseum for the last seven years. But Biden, we are told, is “unpopular,” with an approval rating, according to ABC News and 538, just south of 40%. And so the only possible conclusion is that 2024 is destined to be the election nobody wanted! Imagine that!
But is it really that the voters don’t “want” a Biden-Trump rematch?
Perhaps it’s actually the case that voters don’t want to go through another election that involves Donald Trump. Because the American electorate (and Democrats in particular) couldn’t have expected that when they voted him out of office in 2020, he’d be back in 2024.
And while some may indeed not “prefer” Biden as a candidate, there is no logical reason for the electorate to have expected him not to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Democrats expected that they’d be voting for him again, and Republicans doubtlessly expected they’d be voting against him. No incumbent president has ever lost a primary. Sure, we’ve had incumbents who lost in the general election—Hi, George H. W. Bush!—but he didn’t lose the GOP primary.
As the media endlessly tells us, voters feel Biden is “too old.” But is there any evidence at all that Democratic voters told themselves in 2020 that “this is just for one term”? More importantly, did Biden ever say he intended to drop out for 2024? No, he hasn’t.
Yes, there were the reports in 2023 that Biden said he was "not sure" he’d be running again if Trump wasn’t fighting his way back to the White House. And in 2020, Biden said he saw himself as a “transitional” president, even as a “bridge” to the future. But this was hardly a feature of his 2020 campaign, and all that talk effectively stopped after he was elected. Biden announced his intent to seek reelection in November 2022, and he hasn’t wavered since. So what possible basis would Democrats—or Republicans, for that matter—have to believe that he wouldn’t run in 2024?
When voters are asked whether they “want” a Biden-Trump rematch, they really have no legitimate expectation that Biden wouldn’t be one-half of the equation. What those voters now realize is that Biden will be running against Trump again. And it promises to be a miserable repeat of the 2020 experience because Trump is a miserable, nasty excuse for a human being.
The idea of Trump’s suffocating and unavoidable presence in the 2024 election has, until Iowa and then New Hampshire, always been just a possibility. Now—and if the RNC gets its way—it’s almost certainly a reality. That’s the only thing that’s changed.
Voters weren’t saying they “dreaded” a Biden-Haley contest, or even a Biden-DeSantis contest. The problem is, and has always been, Donald Trump himself.
More importantly, what the voters would have “wanted” matters far less than whether they’ll vote at all in November. That’s why this media narrative is so insidious and corrosive. Democrats may not have “wanted” a Biden-Trump rematch, but that they’ll vote for Biden over Trump is fairly indisputable. His alleged “unpopularity” at this point, as pointed out by A.B. Stoddard for The Bulwark, likely makes no difference.
Republicans, on the other hand, have a primary in which a not-insubstantial number of voters are walking away from Trump, even though, as The Dispatch reported Thursday, the RNC is determined to herd them back toward him.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is reviewing a draft resolution that, if approved, would declare Donald Trump the party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee even as Nikki Haley continues to wage a vigorous campaign against the former president and frontrunner.
The draft resolution, obtained by The Dispatch Thursday morning, was proposed by David Bossie, an RNC committeeman from Maryland and close Trump ally. His effort to put the national party on a general election footing behind Trump follows RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel saying after the former president defeated Haley in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary that it was time for Republicans to unite behind the frontrunner and focus on defeating President Joe Biden.
Bossie pulled his resolution Thursday night, once Trump complained.
But the war over Trump is actually the critical story. Insisting that voters don’t “want” a rematch between Biden and Trump implies the electorate has turned its back on both candidates, without acknowledging that voters’ disgust is less about Biden than it is the toxic experience of having Trump involved in our nation’s politics. It’s a ridiculous assertion that Democrats will turn their backs on Biden if Trump is also on the ballot in November.
Ultimately, it’s simply a “both-sides” talking point that does nothing but poison the political environment and further dampen voter enthusiasm. We must get this right; democracy is at stake.