Biden vs. Trump Is the Rematch that America Wants
Voters deserve more blame than the system for this dismal contest
The rematch is here. On March 12, Joe Biden and Donald Trump surpassed the number of delegates needed to win their party nominations, making it a virtual certainty that one of them will go on to win the 2024 election. According to The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, Jon Stewart, and countless others, Biden vs. Trump is the “rematch nobody wants.” But is that true?
The idea is these are not the candidates voters genuinely prefer. If we could fix the structural features or recalibrate the political norms that are somehow frustrating the vox populi, we would have a system that is more in tune with what Americans want in a deeper, truer sense. With these repairs to the process in place, we would not be saddled with Biden vs. Trump. The problem with this argument is there is no good evidence the American people actually would have chosen anybody else.
When we look at the poll numbers, Biden and Trump have each consistently hovered around 40% approval, with over 50% disapproval in most surveys. And these numbers track what many Americans intuitively sense: that it is unusual for both major party nominees to be this disliked. As recently as the 2008 election, for example, both Barack Obama and John McCain were viewed positively by more than half of the electorate.
But the idea that a majority of Americans disapprove of Biden and that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump is not the same thing as a majority of Americans simultaneously disapproving of both. So called double haters, to use the media’s label for voters who disapprove of both, do not come close to constituting a majority of voters. Surveys consistently show they represent a percentage of voters in the mid to high teens. This year, that number is higher than usual—but it is also nowhere near comprising most voters. In fact, it amounts to fewer than one in five.
Reading and Misreading Candidate Popularity
The insistence that Biden vs. Trump is being foisted on an unwilling public elides why they are the two final candidates. It is straightforward: they are the two candidates who have more support than anyone else, by far. Biden vs. Trump is the choice we face not because the will of the voters is being frustrated, but because the will of the voters is being followed. Biden and Trump both faced opponents in the primaries, and easily defeated them, not because anything was rigged in their favor but because that’s how the voters voted. Nor was there anything stopping a greater number of serious candidates from running. That so few did, especially on the Democratic side, is because it was obvious the voter support wasn’t there to sustain such a challenge.
There is nothing shocking or undemocratic about the fact that the election will come down to the two candidates who have the most support. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and it’s how it would work under any other system for electing a president. Even if voters who like neither Biden nor Trump were united behind a single alternative, that candidate would still be running a distant third.
But the reality is that no such candidacy is feasible, since these voters are not a coherent group and span the political spectrum. Some are progressives angry at Biden over the war in Gaza. Some are on the right, miffed that Trump did not fire Anthony Fauci and takes credit for developing the Covid vaccine. Some are disaffected centrists, a subset that is generally overrepresented among political and media elites. These are not the building blocks of a viable coalition for any one candidate to run as an alternative to Biden or Trump.
Tweaks To The System Would Not Get Us A Different Matchup
There is much to be said for structural electoral reform and breaking up the two-party system. The use of ranked choice voting could incentivize candidates to build broader coalitions, and systems like proportional representation would allow for a more diverse multi-party system. Such reforms can go a long way to defuse the perverse incentives of illiberalizing polarization and lead to more representative outcomes as a whole. But there is no evidence, given Biden and Trump’s overwhelming support among their voters both from polling data and primary results, that these changes would have furnished us with a different matchup in 2024. Nor does the promise of electoral reform mean voters don’t have agency under the current system. Nobody is tricking them into casting ballots for one of these two men. Indeed, if enough Democratic and Republican voters felt strongly enough against Biden or Trump, they could come out and vote against them in the primaries. That so many of them just decided to stay at home and leave the more committed among them to pick the candidate at the very least suggests that they did not care enough that Biden and Trump would become the nominees. This is especially true in the Republican primary where Republican voters had plenty of credible alternatives. But it is also true in the case of Biden because the lack of viable alternatives is itself a product of how Biden always polled a firm majority against any potential primary challenger.
The idea that the Democratic Party is using its incumbency advantage to shoehorn a comparatively unpopular candidate misunderstands this country’s electoral dynamics. American political parties are, by their nature, presidential coalitions led by the incumbent when the party has one. There has been no serious primary challenge to an incumbent since 1980, and even then Ted Kennedy still lost to Jimmy Carter by double digits. While protest candidates occasionally get notable results, such as when convicted felon Keith Judd won over 40% against Barack Obama in West Virginia in 2012, the overall national outcome is never in serious doubt. Even presidents of middling popularity, such as Trump in 2020, face no serious competition for re-nomination because they are still the overwhelming favorite of their own party’s voters. The same has been true of Biden in 2024.
Even the system of partisan primaries, which many rightly bemoan as unrepresentative of the general electorate, does not explain why we got a rematch between Biden and Trump. If every voter who will cast a ballot in November also voted in the primaries, the result would very likely be the same. Both candidates have too commanding a lead within their respective parties, and voters in each party who do not participate in the primaries are not that divergent from those who do. Though polls show some variation between likely voters versus registered voters or all adults, a major study conducted by Pew Research Center suggests these differences amount to a few points at most. Turnout is not enough to change the outcome when a candidate, such as Biden or Trump, is winning by double-digit landslide margins.
The Promise—and the Peril—of Untested Candidates
Those pushing the “this is the rematch nobody wants” idea use counterfactuals to pine for some candidate who, it is imagined, would be more popular. Would a younger Democrat like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, or a moderate Republican like Chris Sununu or Larry Hogan, have fared better? Would they be stronger nominees in the general election? Maybe, but maybe not. These speculations suffer from the fact that the widespread appeal of a non-candidate is untested by the rigors and attacks of entering the arena of presidential electoral contestation. Running for president is a very different game from being a successful governor or senator, and many have found out the skill sets don’t necessarily transfer. And in our highly polarized environment, somebody who has broad appeal in theory would never retain it if they were actually the Republican or Democratic nominee. Trump and Biden themselves would no doubt have better approval ratings if they weren’t running.
Those who insist that this is “the rematch nobody wants” aren’t merely wrong about the support Biden and Trump enjoy relative to their respective party rivals—they’re also guilty of infantilizing voters. The “rematch nobody wants” framing denies that voters know what they want, mean what they say, and are responsible for the choices they make at the ballot box. Ultimately, it is a claim that our system is fundamentally undemocratic and unrepresentative in ways that, for its many faults, it is not. The typical voter, unlike the typical political commentator, is not somebody who dislikes both Biden and Trump; instead, the typical voter is somebody who does support one or the other. These voters get their say, too, and as it turns out they are the overwhelming majority.
So long as we remain committed to a process where voters determine who the presidential nominees will be, no further electoral reforms, third-party candidates, or other deus ex machina interventions can circumvent the preferences of the electorate. It is simply not the case that only some fundamental unfairness could have led us to a rematch between Biden and Trump.
There is an understandable tendency in horse race coverage to focus on swing voters, those undecided between the two main candidates, and marginal turnout voters, who have a preference but are on the fence about showing up at the polls. These are, after all, the people who will “decide the election,” and in this group people who disapprove of both nominees far outnumber the negligible number who approve of both. But these voters are always a small slice of the electorate, not a silent majority. They matter so much not because they are representative of most Americans, but because they are not.
It Comes Down To We, the People
The narrative that voters aren’t really having their say inadvertently supports skepticism about the democratic responsiveness of our current electoral system. It’s part of downward trend in support for our electoral democracy, a growing problem by a variety of metrics. The implicit message is that voting in our elections is ineffectual and that the system is in some important sense rigged. When people start to believe that our electoral system is unresponsive to the people’s wishes, the inevitable result is the belief that they must take recourse via other means. Instead of self-reflection and making better choices next time, the answer becomes lashing out at the whole premise of free elections. Eventually, the core purpose of elections—to be a peaceful mechanism for resolving what would otherwise be violent social conflicts—starts to break down. We’ve already had a bitter preview of what that can look like.
None of this is to say we should be happy with the choice between an establishment octogenarian and an erratic wannabe dictator. It’s entirely fair to argue the voters got it wrong, and maybe they have. These certainly aren’t the two nominees I would have chosen, if it were up to me. But it’s not up to me, it’s up to us, the American people as a collective whole. We could do much better, and should aspire to. But we have nobody to blame but ourselves when we don’t. As tempting as it can be to cast blame elsewhere, that is not how this works. The responsibility is ours and ours alone.
No good can come of denying this reality, of projecting blame elsewhere for the consequences of our own actions. If we hope to do better next time, it is we who must do so. In the meantime, we have a choice to make in the rematch we have chosen.
© The UnPopulist 2024
Follow The UnPopulist on: X, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
 | A guest post by
|
Great article. I think part of the problem is that politics has stopped being the place we go to express what we want, but the place we go to vilify the things we hate. Trump gained so much traction with conservatives in the first place because he was hated by the right people. Supporting Trump became a way to stick it to the liberal establishment. Likewise, the main thing keeping a lot of voters loyal to the Democratic party is not wanting to be associated with MAGA voters. It's a terrible way to make decisions and it won't end well.
It also mirrors a larger problem in politics where we selectively blame our inability to fix things on whatever group we find politically convenient. Conservatives blame everything on progressives, immigrants and brown people. Progressives blame everything on conservatives and "the rich." When in fact, every bad outcome we're seeing now can be linked to clear collective decisions we've made. Housing isn't expensive because Blackrock bought all the houses. Housing is expensive because we've collectively decided to make building new housing difficult and expensive. Look at education, healthcare, poor infrastructure, all of these failures represent the consequences of our collective choices, but we keep finding ways of reflecting.
I'm delighted to vote Biden/Harris again. No problem here.