We’re off to the races. Neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump has his respective party’s 2024 fields to himself anymore.
That’s not to say that either is exactly quaking in his boots, however. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is running a distant fourth in the national RealClearPolitics average, nearly 40 points behind first-place Trump. She also trails two undeclared candidates. An Emerson College poll showed Haley lagging Trump by 50 points, while Fox News has her down 36.
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The third prominent announced Republican, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, doesn’t register at all in the national polling average. GOP voters who want a generational change in leadership haven’t gravitated toward the 37-year-old yet.
Biden is in a similar position. While his national numbers among Democrats are worse than Trump’s with Republicans, according to RealClearPolitics, the president is being tested against candidates who aren’t running against him now and are only likely to get into the race if he takes a pass on a reelection bid. Biden’s only declared opponent is Marianne Williamson, a self-help guru who qualified for some Democratic debates early in the 2020 primaries but was and has remained an asterisk candidate in the polls.
The White House was almost mirthful when the Washington Examiner’s Christian Datoc asked about Williamson — was Biden irritated with her for “jumping in the race ahead of him?" — at a daily press briefing.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, normally quick to invoke the Hatch Act when facing a campaign-related question, began joking about crystal balls. “If I could feel her aura,” Biden’s top spokeswoman said of Williamson. “Gosh, you guys are making me laugh now.”
At the moment, Trump and even more so Biden may face only nominal primary opposition. There will be other names on the ballot, but they may not pose a much greater threat than Harold Stassen, Lyndon LaRouche, or 2020’s dynamic duo of Joe Walsh and Bill Weld.
They had both better hope it stays that way. Incumbents, and the party in power more broadly, should generally want to avoid primary challenges. They seldom work. You have to go all the way back to 1968 to find a successful example of one toppling a sitting president. That was during the Vietnam War, as the country seemed to be spinning out of control, and Eugene McCarthy, the Democrat who drew first blood against Lyndon Johnson, didn’t even end up being the nominee.
Gerald Ford edged out Ronald Reagan in the primaries and on the floor of the 1976 Republican National Convention but went on to lose in November. Four years later, Jimmy Carter beat back Ted Kennedy to hold on to the Democratic nomination but lost the 1980 general election in a landslide. George H.W. Bush didn’t lose a single primary to Pat Buchanan in 1992, but even a mildly competitive New Hampshire primary — the 41st president still won by 16 points — set in motion a chain of events that ended 12 straight years of Republicans in the Oval Office.
There is a bit of a chicken or egg dilemma in each of these cases — did the primary challengers weaken the incumbents, or did they attract challengers because they were already weak incumbents in the first place?
But it is unmistakably the case that primary challengers can expose vulnerabilities that other higher-quality opponents might capitalize on in the general election. They also road-test attacks that might prove effective in more capable hands. Al Gore raised Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988 before Bush did.
Ford’s underwhelming win over Reagan showed a lack of conservative enthusiasm for the unelected incumbent as well as a desire even among some Republicans for a clean break from Richard Nixon. Carter’s contest with Kennedy revealed weakness on his left flank and foreshadowed his inability to beat Reagan in states like New York and Massachusetts.
Buchanan’s message in New Hampshire to blue-collar workers, who pleaded with him to “save our jobs,” demonstrated that although the recession had ended in March 1991, the lingering effects were still being felt, even by those who had voted Republican in the previous three elections. It also showed Bush’s vulnerability to a trade protectionist challenger, which he got in the general election in the form of independent Ross Perot, who received a fifth of the vote. Finally, Buchanan was a warning sign that there were many disenchanted conservatives after Bush broke his pledge not to raise taxes.
That’s a lot of red flags thrown by a primary challenge that rarely received more than a third of the vote in any state.
The same potential holds true in 2024. If Williamson gains even a modicum of traction, it’s possible that someone more threatening to Biden reconsiders, just as McCarthy drew in Robert Kennedy in 1968. If Haley or Ramaswamy fail to persuade enough Republicans that it is time for a younger generation to lead, they might still succeed in neutralizing whatever age advantage Trump would have over octogenarian Biden.
But there’s another GOP elephant in the room: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has headed to early primary states as an all-but-declared candidate. He appears to be waiting out the Florida legislative session, including the tweaking of a state law to enable him to run without resigning as governor. The polls already show DeSantis is a serious challenger to the quasi-incumbent Trump.
The lower-polling Republican candidates, who otherwise seem like interlopers in a fight resembling the 1976 Ford-Reagan contest, may pose an even more acute threat to DeSantis. The logic of most of their candidacies is that if they could just get Trump one on one, their standing would improve quickly. That means they need to hope DeSantis doesn’t run — or take him out if he does.
Nearly everyone else in the race will have the incentive to go after DeSantis in the hopes of getting a clean shot at Trump. DeSantis could find himself being attacked by Trump on the one hand as a populist poseur and establishment Trojan horse, while other hypothetical contenders — think former Vice President Mike Pence or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or pugilistic former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — say the Florida governor is too much like Trump.
Perhaps like Goldilocks and her favorite porridge, Republican primary voters will conclude DeSantis is just right. But it’s yet another reason DeSantis, who polls best against Trump one on one, should see a crowded field as a risk.
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The argument that DeSantis is too much like Trump will automatically be the one employed by Democrats if the governor is the GOP nominee. Biden is already using it, and the “MAGA” epithet is purposefully designed to be transferable to non-Trump candidates. Meanwhile, Trump sowing doubt about DeSantis’s populist credentials could harm Republicans in the Rust Belt states that will once again decide the presidency.
All this is a long way off. But the moral of the story is that top-tier candidates cannot overlook the also-rans. Just because they can’t beat you themselves does not mean they can’t help someone else beat you later.