Original title: Biden announced his re-election bid for the presidency, highlighting the unpredictability of the US election
On April 25 local time, US President Biden officially announced that he will participate in the 2024 presidential election. Since it is more likely that Biden and former US President Trump will face off again next year, the media generally expects that there may be an “epic” re-contest in the United States. However, polls show that neither Biden nor Trump is popular with the American public. Biden will face more complex challenges if he runs again.
The 80-year-old Biden said in a video released on the same day that the United States is still in the struggle of “fighting for the soul of the country” and that he needs more time to “finish this work”, so he announced his re-election bid. The video particularly highlights the “Capitol Hill riot” on January 6, 2021 and last year’s anti-abortion protests by Democratic voters, pointing the finger at the extreme forces of the Republican Party. A few hours after Biden announced his candidacy, US Vice President Harris said in a speech on a university campus in Washington that she was proud to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Biden again, and severely criticized conservative extremist forces across the United States. Limit abortion measures. The above remarks show that the Biden campaign team has made “defending American democracy and freedom” one of its main issues in the next year’s general election.
On the same day, when Biden delivered a speech at the North American Construction Industry Union, he focused on attracting blue-collar and middle-class voters, emphasizing that in the future he will continue to increase infrastructure investment and rebuild the middle class, and his economic plan will be “blue-collar A Blueprint for Rebuilding America”. Apparently, Biden has learned the lessons of his 2016 presidential defeat, when half of the rank-and-file members of construction unions in North America voted for Trump, bringing the latter to the White House that year. In fact, from the beginning of the 2020 presidential election, Biden has continuously promised to improve the life of the country’s backbone, the middle class. To win the 2024 election, he will have to focus on the middle class again.
For Biden’s official candidacy, Trump has already “sharpened his sword” and made sufficient preparations. After Biden’s official announcement, Trump sent out a tit-for-tat video criticizing Biden’s series of governance mistakes. “You can pick out the 5 worst presidents in American history, and together they can’t compare to the damage Biden has done to America,” he said, citing Biden’s “disastrous and failed” presidency Examples include “the worst inflation in 50 years”, real wages have fallen for two consecutive years, gasoline prices have risen, the number of homeless people has increased, and crime rates have continued to rise. Trump’s accusations are actually not entirely unreasonable. Some economists predict that the U.S. economy will face a major risk of recession in the next nine months. The last president to win re-election despite a recession in the final two years of his term was McKinley in 1900. In contrast, both Carter in 1980 and Bush Sr. in 1992 lost because of recession.
Biden’s age and physical condition are also one of the important factors in determining the outcome of the 2024 election. An article published on the website of the British “Financial Times” on April 25 wittily compared the competition between the 80-year-old Biden and the 76-year-old Trump to two bald men fighting over a comb, highlighting the seriousness of this competition. tedious. Last year, a video of Biden falling while riding a bicycle in his hometown of Delaware circulated wildly online. Although the full-time doctor in the White House has repeatedly assured that Biden is in good health, American voters are still worried about Biden’s weakening physical and energy. Whenever the president ran up to the podium or jumped off the steps of an airplane, his aides were said to be on edge.
The Republican Party has repeatedly exaggerated that voting for the elderly Biden is tantamount to handing over the White House to Harris. The British “Economist” stated that Vice President Harris is known for messing up the things assigned to her, such as blocking foreign immigrants at the southern border, and the public’s support for her is even lower than that for Biden. Her rate of slips of the tongue is on par with Biden’s, despite her youth. The German “Der Spiegel” weekly analyzed that if Biden has health problems shortly before next year’s general election, or even withdraws completely, Harris will have to take over the White House, and she may also become a candidate for subsequent competition with Trump. The 2024 election has become completely unpredictable.
The variables of the presidential candidates in the Republican Party will also affect Biden’s probability of winning the election. In March, Trump was sued by the state of New York for paying hush money and falsifying records. By the time the election season begins, the odds are high that Trump will face one or two more criminal charges. This greatly increases the possibility of Florida Governor DeSantis participating in the Republican primary election. On April 26, just as South Korean President Yoon Seok-yue visited Washington, DeSantis also started his trip to Seoul, highlighting his desire to be more eye-catching diplomatically. Although DeSantis currently lags behind Trump by double digits in the party’s support rate, his image as a new generation of Republican politicians has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Moreover, if the Republican establishment unites to nominate DeSantis for president against Biden, the 44-year-old DeSantis is clearly more likely to win.
All in all, Biden’s official announcement of his re-election campaign is obviously a last resort, mainly intended to prevent Trump from re-entering the White House on behalf of the Democratic Party. However, the current economic situation in the United States is not “friendly” to the incumbent president. The major presidential candidates of both parties are facing investigations by the Department of Justice, and the age of both parties is also a deduction item. Although Biden has the administrative resources to use the White House as his campaign base, Trump’s forte lies in fanning the enthusiasm of conservatives. Today, when the political polarization in the United States has reached an unprecedented level, the presidential election has become a life-and-death duel between the liberals and conservatives, and its unpredictability is even more prominent.
(Author: Zhang Zhixin, Ph.D., Associate Researcher, Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations)