By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
August 01, 2023
Donald Trump doesn’t
look, at the moment, like he needs any help winning the Republican nomination,
but he’s getting an assist from President Joe Biden.
The
incumbent president — rather than being the indispensable political antidote to
Trump that Democrats imagine him as — may well prove the key to his
predecessor’s return to the White House.
Biden is
an asset to Trump’s primary campaign and could, through his weakness and
ineptitude, end up electing him in 2024.
Biden is
indicting Trump; he’s making Republicans pine for the days when Trump was
president; and he’s lackluster in prospective head-to-head polling matchups.
All of
which is boosting his adversary’s prospects. The indictments, of course, create
a rally-around-the flag effect among Republicans. It was the shoddy indictment
from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg that launched Trump onto a new,
higher trajectory in the primary race. But the federal indictments from special
counsel Jack Smith have reinforced the effect.
That the
indictments come with a split screen of the Biden Department of Justice
coddling Hunter Biden only makes Trump’s argument that there’s a two-tier
system of justice that’s been weaponized against him more potent.
Meanwhile,
Biden’s poor record in office drives GOP nostalgia for the Trump presidency, a
significant benefit to the former president looking for a restoration.
Finally,
Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t
electable, but Biden’s dismal political standing vitiates this case. Every time
there’s a poll showing Trump competitive with Biden, it’s harder to portray him
as a sure loser. The RealClearPolitics polling average has
Biden leading Trump by less than a point, and a recent Marquette University
poll had the two tied 50–50.
Democrats
may figure that all this is good — Trump is so toxic that he’s the weakest of
the plausible Republican candidates, no matter what polls more than a year
before the election might say. Biden beat him once before, right?
Yes, but
it’s not as though he trounced Trump the first time around. Biden’s Electoral
College victory was built on a series of razor-thin victories in places such as
Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Who’s to say that in the right circumstances
for Trump they couldn’t tip the other way? Trump narrowly won in 2016 and
narrowly lost in 2020, so why is another narrow victory supposed to be out of
the question?
It’s
often said that Trump hasn’t done anything to win one swing voter back to his
side since 2020. True enough, but Biden, who hasn’t been the norm-honoring
moderate as advertised, has certainly done things to shed voters.
Democrats
act as if Biden is a once-in-a-generation political talent when he’s an
80-year-old man whose foremost political achievement is beating an unpopular
incumbent in the midst of a pandemic with a basement campaign. In Biden’s tenth
quarter in office, Gallup has his approval rating at 40 percent, the lowest
rating for post–World War II presidents at that point with the exception of
Jimmy Carter.
As the
2016 election demonstrated, running two candidates who are deeply unpopular is
a recipe for volatility. And Trump–Biden would make Trump–Hillary look like the
halcyon days of widely admired, consensus political leaders. A CNN poll from
June found that 36 percent of respondents didn’t view either Trump or Biden
favorably, and only about a third had a favorable view of each of them.
Indeed,
the 2016 vibe is strong. Back then, Democrats hoped to run against Trump and
put up their own incredibly weak candidate with barely a serious internal fight
(Bernie Sanders was never going to win the nomination) or second thought. One
of Clinton’s serious vulnerabilities, the email scandal, was ruled off-limits,
just as Biden’s age and his family’s influence-peddling scandal are verboten
topics among Democrats now.
How did
that turn out?
If Trump
would have lots of baggage heading into 2024, he’d also presumably have a
beatable incumbent standing between him and a second term.
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