ATLANTA (AP) — There is widespread concern among Democrats about whether the 81-year-old president Joe Biden depends on the task itself or on defeating Donald Trump.
Past presidential campaigns offer lessons. None provide cause for optimism.
Going back to Lyndon B. Johnson In 1968, several presidents who were up for re-election faced significant challenges in the primaries or questions about whether they should run again. George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter And Gerald Ford persevered and won their nominations, but in November they were defeated. Johnson chose to withdraw — and the Democrats lost anyway.
Biden didn’t have a real primary fight. But his allies now recognize how poorly the president performed in his debate against Trump. They have privately worried about Biden’s ability to serve until he’s 86 and, more immediately, whether he can keep his job by defeating the Republican former president — himself a 78-year-old saddled with a felony conviction, other charges and voter concerns about his values and temperament.
The warning from history is ominous: sitting presidents who are still trying to consolidate and reassure their own party this late in their first term tend not to get a second term.
George HW Bush and the ‘Culture War’ of 1992
Bush was an Episcopalian Christian with an Ivy League education. He was a moderate Republican and was never a favorite of the Christian right or anti-tax, anti-small-government activists.
Bush appealed to the right before his 1988 victory, saying, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” He was on the rise in 1990 after a swift U.S. military victory drove Iraq and Saddam Hussein out of oil-rich Kuwait. Within months, however, Bush had broken his tax pledge, the U.S. economy began to falter (albeit only slightly in retrospect), and the president became vulnerable.
Challengers emerged, notably Steve Forbes, an anti-tax crusader, and commentator Pat Buchanan, a Christian conservative. Bush won every primary, but many by unimpressive margins. Buchanan, rather than enthusiastically endorsing Bush, used his GOP convention speech to engage religious conservatives in a “culture war” against Clintonliberals and secularism — standard Republican rhetoric today, but a more divisive tone next to Bush’s talk of a “kinder, gentler” country.
Democratic challenger and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton hammered Bush for being out of touch with the American middle class, and billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent.
On Election Day, 62.6 percent of voters voted against Bush. Clinton won 370 electoral votes, the second-highest number of votes for a Democrat since 1964.
Jimmy Carter and the Kennedy ‘dream’ in 1980
Carter, a former governor of Georgia, was a moderate southerner from outside the liberal Democratic power structure. His 1976 nomination and eventual victory over Republican incumbent Ford, however, was less about ideology and more about Carter’s promise never to lie to Americans disillusioned by Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
Legislative successes followed, but Carter irritated Democrats in Washington. Global inflation, U.S. unemployment, and interest rates rose, and Carter’s popularity fell.
“Carter was never expected or accepted by the establishment,” said Joe Trippi, a Kennedy campaign staffer in 1980.
Senator Ted Kennedy a primary challenge in 1980 that inspired young progressives, such as those who had once idolized his murdered older brothers. Carter famously said of Kennedy, “I’ll beat the crap out of him.” The president won enough delegates to win the nomination, even as the Iran hostage crisis compounded his problems.
But when Kennedy lost, he used his convention speech more to galvanize his own supporters than to reconcile with the sitting president. “The work goes on, the cause continues … and the dream will never die,” Kennedy declared, exposing Carter’s weaknesses.
Against Republican Ronald ReaganCarter won only six states and Washington, DC
Gerald Ford and the Budding Reagan Revolution in 1976
Reagan won the general election twice by large margins, but the foundation was laid by his challenge to Ford in the 1976 primaries.
Ford, a soft-spoken man from Michigan, had a unique path to the White House. Richard Nixon elevated him from leadership of the House of Representatives to the vice presidency in 1973 after corruption forced Spiro Agnew to resign. Ford ascended to the presidency a year later when Nixon resigned over Watergate.
Controversially, Ford pardoned Nixon. He was facing inflation, high unemployment, and troubled energy markets. And he had to quickly prepare to seek his own election, having never been part of a national campaign.
Ford came from the center-right of Capitol Hill, a Republican clique that largely accepted the federal government’s expanded reach since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan, meanwhile, cohered conservatives who had never embraced FDR’s America and paled in comparison to the civil rights movement and social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s.
In the ’76 primaries, Ford won 27 contests to Reagan’s 24. That gave the incumbent delegate 1,121 delegates, only 43 more than the insurgent challenger. Reagan had dominated most of the primaries in the South, the most conservative region in the country.
In the fall campaign, a wounded Ford made a late comeback against Carter, but he fell short. Carter carried the South. And Reagan was positioned to take over the Republican mantle four years later.
When a President Resigned: LBJ and 1968
Ford, Carter and Bush aren’t perfect parallels for 2024: Biden failed to mount a credible challenge in the primaries and, even with the debate fallout, he has a wellspring of personal goodwill within his party. Perhaps the best comparison, then, is Johnson.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy propelled Johnson into the Oval Office in November 1963. Known as LBJ, the colorful Texan defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. Johnson assembled the most sweeping legislative effort since FDR: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid. But Johnson vastly expanded U.S. involvement in Vietnam — and lied to the country in the process. He also proved incapable of leading Americans through the social changes of the era.
Presidential campaigns were shorter then, so it wasn’t until March 31, 1968, that Johnson considered his weak position and announced his intentions. After a weak showing in the early primaries, which were not yet binding matters, Johnson said in a speech from the Oval Office: “I will not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
What happened next, however, was hardly encouraging for Democrats hoping to hear the same from Biden.
Senator from New York. Robert F. Kennedy — whose son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is running as an independent for president this year — joined a spirited Democratic nomination race and gained momentum by winning the California primary in June. But he was assassinated in Los Angeles minutes after his victory speech.
Democrats were left with a raucous convention in Chicago — also the site of the 2024 convention. They chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey to run against Nixon, the former Republican vice president who had lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then dropped out of the race for governor of California in 1962.
Neither Nixon nor Humphrey were widely popular and the resulting general election was a close one, with independent George Wallace the key factor. Nixon outpolled Humphrey by about 500,000 votes out of the 73 million cast, winning 301 electoral votes.
Seven months after a beleaguered Democratic president resigned, his party suffered a defeat. Republicans, with a president-elect who would one day step down in disgrace, had their comeback story.
