ATLANTA (AP) — There are deep concerns among Democrats about whether 81-year-old President Joe Biden is up to the job and whether he is up to the task of defeating Donald Trump.
There are lessons to be learned from previous presidential election campaigns. None of them give cause for optimism.
Since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, several presidents running for re-election have faced major challenges in the primaries or on whether to run again. George HW Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford prevailed and won their nominations, but then lost in November. Johnson withdrew – and the Democrats still lost.
Biden had no real primary campaign. But his allies now recognize how poorly the president fared in the debate against Trump. They have privately worried about whether Biden can stay in office until he is 86 and, more urgently, whether he can keep office by defeating the Republican ex-president – himself a 78-year-old burdened with a felony conviction, other charges and voter concerns about his values and temperament.
History is a grim warning: Incumbent presidents who are still consolidating and strengthening their party so behind schedule in their first term usually do not get a second term.
George HW Bush and the “culture war” of 1992
Bush was an Ivy League-educated Episcopalian and moderate Republican who was never a darling of the Christian right or of anti-tax and smaller-government activists.
Before his 1988 election victory, Bush appealed to the right, saying, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” In 1990, he was at the peak of his career, after a quick U.S. military victory drove Iraq and Saddam Hussein out of oil-rich Kuwait. But within months, Bush broke his tax promise, the U.S. economy began to weaken (though only slightly in retrospect), and the president became vulnerable.
The main challengers in the primaries were Steve Forbes, an anti-tax activist, and the commentator Pat Buchanan, a Christian conservative. Bush won all of the primaries, but many by unimpressive margins. Buchanan did not enthusiastically support Bush, but used his speech at the Republican convention to rally religious conservatives to a “culture war” against Clinton, liberals and secularism – common Republican rhetoric today, but one that strikes a more polarizing tone compared to Bush’s talk of a “kinder, gentler” nation.
The Democratic challenger and governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, accused Bush of having lost touch with the American middle class. And billionaire Ross Perot entered the election campaign as an independent.
On election day, 62.6% of voters voted against Bush. Clinton received 370 votes, the second highest result of any Democrat since 1964.
Jimmy Carter and the Kennedy Dream in 1980
Carter, a former governor of Georgia, was a moderate Southerner who stood outside the liberal Democratic power structure. But his nomination in 1976 and his subsequent victory over Republican incumbent Ford were less ideological than Carter’s promise never to lie to Americans disillusioned by Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
Legislative successes followed, but Carter angered Democrats in Washington. Global inflation, unemployment and interest rates in the United States rose, and Carter’s popularity declined.
“Carter was never expected or accepted by the establishment,” said Joe Trippi, a Kennedy campaign official in 1980.
Senator Ted Kennedy ran in a primary in 1980, inspiring adolescent progressives like those who had once idolized his murdered older brothers. Carter famously said of Kennedy, “I’m going to kick his ass.” The president won enough delegates for the nomination, even though the Iran hostage crisis compounded his problems.
But after his defeat, Kennedy used his speech at the convention to mobilize his own supporters rather than to reconcile himself with the incumbent. “The work goes on, the cause endures… and the dream will never die,” Kennedy declared, exposing Carter’s weaknesses.
Against Republican Ronald Reagan, Carter won only in six states and in Washington, DC
Gerald Ford and the emerging Reagan revolution in 1976
Reagan won two general elections by overwhelming margins, but the foundation for that was his battle against Ford in the 1976 primaries.
Ford, a mild-mannered Michigan native, had a unique path to the White House. President Richard Nixon promoted him from the House to vice president in 1973 after corruption forced Spiro Agnew to resign. Ford ascended to the presidency a year later when Nixon resigned over Watergate.
Ford pardoned Nixon, which was controversial. He was faced with inflation, high unemployment and volatile energy markets. And he had to quickly prepare for his own election, having never been part of a national campaign.
Ford came from the center-right camp in the U.S. Congress, a Republican cohort that largely accepted the expanded scope of the federal government since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan, on the other hand, rallied conservatives who never accepted Roosevelt’s America and rejected the civil rights movement and the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1976 primaries, Ford won 27 and Reagan 24. This gave the incumbent 1,121 delegates, just 43 more than his rebellious challenger. Reagan had dominated most of the primaries in the South, the most conservative region of the country.
In the fall election campaign, the ailing Ford made a behind schedule comeback against Carter, but he failed. Carter won the South. And Reagan was able to take over the Republican leadership four years later.
When a president resigned: LBJ and 1968
Ford, Carter and Bush are not perfect parallels for 2024: Biden did not pose a credible challenge in the primaries and, despite the fallout from the debate, he enjoys a lot of personal goodwill in his party. So perhaps the best comparison is Johnson.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy helped Johnson ascend to the Oval Office in November 1963. The flamboyant Texan, known as LBJ, defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. Johnson introduced the most comprehensive bills since Roosevelt: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Medicare and Medicaid. However, Johnson greatly expanded US involvement in Vietnam – and lied to the country in the process. He was also unable to lead Americans through the social changes of that time.
Presidential campaigns were shorter back then, and it was not until March 31, 1968, that Johnson reflected on his waning popularity and announced his intentions. After frail results in the first primaries, which were not yet binding matters at the time, Johnson said in a speech in the Oval Office: “I will neither seek nor accept my party’s nomination for another term as your President.”
What followed, however, is not necessarily encouraging for Democrats, who had hoped to hear the same from Biden.
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy – whose son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent presidential candidate this year – was involved in a heated Democratic battle for the nomination and secured a lead with his victory in the California primary in June, but was assassinated in Los Angeles minutes after his victory speech.
The Democrats were left with a turbulent convention in Chicago – the venue for the 2024 convention. They chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey to oppose Nixon, the former Republican vice president who lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and also lost the California gubernatorial election in 1962.
Neither Nixon nor Humphrey enjoyed great popularity, and the resulting general election was close, with independent George Wallace a deciding factor. Nixon outpolled Humphrey by about 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast, securing 301 electoral votes.
Seven months after a beleaguered Democratic president resigned, his party suffered a defeat. The Republicans, whose president-elect would one day resign in disgrace, staged a comeback.
