Americans, who don’t agree on much, are unified on one thing: we don’t want another Biden vs. Trump presidential election.
Bad news: we’re going to get ourselves another Biden vs. Trump presidential election.
“Let’s finish the job. I know we can,” Joe Biden said in a video announcing the launch of his re-election campaign that was released on Tuesday.
It’s not like this was a state secret. Biden had been hinting, outright saying, that he was going to run for months, in the face of polls that have even a majority of Democrats saying they’d prefer somebody else.
But no one else is emerging on the thin Democratic bench. Vice President Kamala Harris is even less liked than Biden, and no other Democrats have anything resembling a national profile.
Republicans are, similarly, stuck with Donald Trump, who was elected president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by 3 million votes, then was trounced in his re-election bid in 2020, losing to Biden by more than 7 million votes.
Trump formally entered the race months ago, ahead of a $250 million civil suit being filed against him and his company, and criminal charges filed in a case related to the payout he made to a porn actress in 2016.
The Republican frontrunner is also likely to face additional criminal charges in Georgia related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which he continues to insist, without any evidence backing him up, was stolen from him.
Trump’s campaign has been spending big money on cable on TV ads aimed at kneecapping his likely biggest GOP nomination rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who can’t seem to get out of his own way, to the point that a major donor announced earlier this month that he is taking a “pause” from DeSantis.
The strategy harkens back to a similar move by the Bill Clinton 1996 re-election campaign going big early on TV to lay the groundwork for the fall campaign, but comes with risks for Trump, whose 2020 campaign fell far short of its fundraising goals, and had to pull back on its TV ads late in the campaign because it was out of cash.
But in the here and now, Trump seems to have clear sailing toward the Republican nomination.
Biden, who is 80, and would be 86 at the end of a second term in 2029, stakes his claim to the Democratic nomination on being the only candidate who can beat Trump.
“I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are,” Biden said in his announcement video.
If it feels like America is stuck in neutral, it’s because we are.
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Chris Graham
