US election 2024: a year tonight…
A year today, this evening, the world will be watching and waiting for the result from America. Will US voters give us four more years of Joe Biden, a second round of Trump or something else entirely? We will, in the days and weeks that follow election 2024, find out what’s in store.
With 12 months to go, Biden is in trouble.
When he won in 2020 at the age of 76, he did so with an anti-Trump coalition of radical progressives and suburban centrists, while retaining over 90 per cent of the Democrat-loyal black vote. But as the clock runs down on the start of the primaries and with Biden’s already questionable mental acuity dwindling, those in each part of the anti-Trump coalition are trying to work out whether to strike down the President and find an alternative candidate.
There are two relative newcomers who could make like difficult for Biden. From the radical progressive side, there is Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American who has accused Biden of supporting the “genocide” in Gaza. From the centrists – who have condemned Tlaib’s anti-Israel stance – there is Dean Phillips who promises to “make America affordable again.” In 2020, Trump was the enemy and Biden looked like the only one who could beat him. Indeed, it was the same off-year election day poll that galvanised the Biden-Harris campaign before their victory. But with Biden’s demeanour worsening and the conflict in the Middle East showing the philosophical gulf between those on different parts of the Left, the real fight has commenced over who will run for the Democrats.
As Adam Boulton points out today in his latest column on Reaction, the Democrats are in a panic after woeful polling numbers at the weekend showed Biden trailing the never-out-of-court Trump in six key swing states. Although the New York Times poll put Biden ahead in Wisconsin by two points, Trump is leading in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Crucially, Biden won all of these in 2020.
More worryingly for the Democrats, 71 per cent of voters said Biden was too old – and that includes more than half of his supporters. In comparison, only 39 per cent thought Trump was too old even though at 78 he would be the oldest president to ever be inaugurated.
A CBS News poll found that 45 per cent of voters think they would be financially better off with Trump, whereas only 18 per cent thought so with Biden.
Not only does today mark a year until the election, but it is also the day of some seriously important local and statewide elections. All legislative seats are up for grabs in Virginia and New Jersey, there are governor votes in Kentucky and Mississippi, a congressional election in Rhode Island, an abortion vote in Ohio and mayoral votes in Houston and Philadelphia.
These could provide important hints of voter sentiment across a wide geographical spread and on a range of issues.
In Britain, Keir Starmer has suffered the dissent of the progressive wing of the Labour party for his relatively robust anti-Hamas and pro-Israel stance on the Middle East crisis. Similarly, Biden is experiencing pushback. Both men will spend the next year trying to keep these loudest sections of their parties sweet while avoiding accusations of appeasing radicals. But where Labour looks like a government-in-waiting, the Democrats look increasingly like a party in crisis.
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