President Donald J. Trump addresses his remarks Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019, at Turning Point USA’s 5th annual Student Action Summit at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
In The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy discusses President Donald Trump’s road to reclaiming the White House. He writes:
Donald Trump is having a better year than Joe Biden, notwithstanding an indictment or two.
Both men hold commanding leads in the race for their parties’ presidential nominations. But the comparison works to Trump’s benefit: he isn’t quite an incumbent, while President Biden most definitely is.
Not since George H.W. Bush in 1992 has an incumbent president faced a challenge within his own party as serious as the one Biden faces from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After weeks of unceasingly hostile press coverage, RFK Jr. still holds onto 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote.
Meanwhile, polling averages show Biden barely beating Trump in a prospective rematch next year. And a slim lead is no comfort at all, given that polling averages underestimated Trump’s support in both 2016 and 2020.
And if Trump’s legal problems should suddenly do him far more damage within the GOP than they have so far, Biden would fare no better if Ron DeSantis became the Republican nominee.
Unfortunately for the Florida governor, his own numbers against Biden are not so different from Trump’s as to give Republican voters an irresistible argument to switch loyalties in the primary.
Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was slim to begin with. He won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point, and Georgia by less than that. His margin in Pennsylvania was less than 1.2 percent. Last time, President Trump was saddled with the Covid crisis and Black Lives Matter protests. Now President Biden is saddled with inflation and war in Europe.
Biden certainly wants to remain president, and he’s rigged the Democratic primary calendar to frontload South Carolina, the state that set him on the path to the nomination three years ago. But Iowa and New Hampshire may not play along with Biden’s plan, even if their refusal leads to penalties from the Democratic National Committee. If Biden declines to campaign in states that jump ahead of South Carolina, he risks losing the first contests to RFK Jr. — or suffering embarrassment even if he wins, if his margins are less than overwhelming.
The president is old enough to remember what happened in 1968: Eugene McCarthy didn’t have to beat President Johnson to wreck his hopes of reelection. Revealing his weakness was more than enough. Should RFK do that to Biden, there are stronger contenders waiting to play the role that Kennedy’s father played in ’68, as the substitute for a withdrawn incumbent. California governor Gavin Newsom would like to be president sooner rather than later. So would Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who scored a ten-point reelection victory last year.
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
