Joe Biden is in trouble.
While the Republican primary is chronologically far from over, Donald Trump’s current 50-point lead is so commanding that it is virtually a foregone conclusion, barring a drastic turn of fortune, that the 2024 general election will be a rematch between Biden and Trump.
On first thought, one might think winning would be a cinch for Biden. After all, he “beat” Trump once already. And he is also the incumbent president.
But those usually crucial advantages are blunted this time around. In a previous piece, I explained that because Trump served in the presidency already, Biden cannot capitalize on the typical incumbent advantage of being able to define a lesser-known challenger who has not held the office before.
Rather, Trump’s standing against Biden is more comparable to that of Grover Cleveland (a former president who won a nonconsecutive term against the man who had frustrated his reelection bid four years prior) or Theodore Roosevelt (who might have accomplished the same feat as Cleveland had he run on the GOP ticket rather than as a third-party candidate, and still pulled off the biggest third-party bid in U.S. history, with 27.4 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes).
But there’s another key phenomenon holding Biden back: His actions and the conditions of the country place him in a situation not unlike that of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
There are many significant parallels between Clinton and Biden; the fact that Trump pulled ahead and won against Clinton further illustrates the real viability he has to defeat Biden in 2024.
First, one of the big issues many voters had with Clinton was her health and the effect this would have on her aptitude to meet the demands of the presidency. Republican pundits played up the rumors of health issues, which Clinton denied. Yet, real or not, footage of Clinton’s behavior played into the narrative. Who can forget the infamous clip of Clinton apparently fainting as she was aided into a van? And then there were the strange faces she would sometimes make, which appeared to suggest the onset of some type of illness.
In the same way, Biden’s health has now become a major cause of concern among voters — more so than it was in 2020. The intervening years have only worsened what seems to be senility or dementia; and whereas during the 2020 election Biden could stay in his basement and give very carefully choreographed speeches due to Covid-19, the last few years of his presidency have provided a huge collection of gaffes fueling the belief that he is not mentally capable to serve as commander-in-chief.
There is also the corruption angle. One of the reasons Trump beat Clinton was because he highly galvanized the Republican base, while Clinton was unable to do the same with Democrats. And while Clinton’s inability to do so was due to several factors (her personality, her political stances, her record), one of the biggest ones was the overall perception — even among members of her own party — that she was corrupt.
And that perception did not come from nowhere. From Whitewater to Benghazi to the Clinton Foundation to the private email server, scandal and corruption have followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for years. Even many who voted for Hillary believed she used public office for her own financial benefit, and only cast their ballots for her because they thought Trump was going to be a fascist dictator.
While Biden has just as many skeletons in his closet, Democrats in 2020 were able to downplay them as Republican conspiracy theories. But they aren’t able to anymore. The infamous Hunter Biden laptop and its contents — which proved the Biden family has been financially profiting off Joe Biden’s time in public office via illicit business deals — was a story censored by the mainstream media in 2020 on the grounds of it being “misinformation.”
Now, the media has since acknowledged that it was true the whole time. And Hunter Biden himself has been federally indicted. And Republican probes into the Biden family are making their shady escapades ever-more public.
In short, Biden’s reputation has taken a major beating. As with Clinton in 2016, Biden now finds himself distrusted by a large swath of the voting public.
Then there’s the fact that Clinton had to run as a Democrat during a time when the party, under Obama, was presiding over a period of economic stagnation and struggle for families across the country.
America today faces the same type of economic difficulties, with inflation and high prices crippling the finances of working households. However, in this case, Biden himself is the one who has presided over the woeful economy, so voters are inclined to hold him even more accountable than they held Clinton and the Democrats in 2016.
Finally, just as Clinton’s unpopularity within her own party resulted in third-party bids undercutting her votes (2016 saw the Libertarians and Green Party play a not-insignificant role as third-party spoilers), Biden will have to grapple with the effect of independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West — both leftists who could potentially pull major votes away from Biden.
In conclusion, Biden’s campaign stands a good chance of going the way of Hillary Clinton’s — that is, losing to Donald Trump.
