ATLANTA – There is much concern among Democrats about whether 81-year-old President Joe Biden is up to the job or the task of defeating Donald Trump.
Past presidential campaigns offer lessons. None convey reasons for optimism.
Going back to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, several presidents eligible for reelection have faced significant primary challenges or questions about whether they should run again. George HW Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford advanced and won their nominations, only to be defeated in November. Johnson chose to withdraw – and the Democrats lost anyway.
Biden had no real fight in the primaries. But your allies now recognize how badly the President performed in his debate against Trump. They have privately worried about Biden’s ability to serve until age 86 and, more immediately, whether he can keep the job by defeating the Former Republican President – himself a 78-year-old man burdened with a criminal convictionother accusations and concerns from voters about his values and temperament.
History’s warning is ominous: incumbent presidents who are still working to consolidate and reassure their own party at this point in their first term typically fail to win a second.
An Ivy League-educated Episcopalian, Bush was a moderate Republican and was never a favorite of the Christian right or anti-tax and small-government activists.
Bush appealed to the right flank before his victory in 1988, saying: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” It was riding high in 1990 after a quick U.S. military victory drove Iraq and Saddam Hussein out of oil-rich Kuwait. However, within months, Bush broke his fiscal promise, the US economy began to falter (albeit slightly in retrospect) and the president became vulnerable.
The main challengers emerged, namely Steve Forbes, an anti-tax crusader, and commentator Pat Buchanan, a Christian conservative. Bush won every primary, but many by unimpressive margins. Buchanan, instead of enthusiastically endorsing Bush, used his speech at the Republican Party convention enlisting religious conservatives in a “culture war” against Clinton, liberals and secularism – standard Republican rhetoric today, but in a more divisive tone alongside Bush’s talk of a “kinder, gentler” nation.
Democratic challenger and governor of Arkansas. Bill Clinton criticized Bush for being out of touch with middle-class Americans. And billionaire Ross Perot entered the contest as an independent.
On election day, 62.6% of voters chose against Bush. Clinton won 370 electoral votes, the second highest total for any Democrat since 1964.
A former governor of Georgia, Carter was a moderate Southerner from outside the liberal Democratic power structure. His 1976 nomination and eventual victory over the Republican incumbent Ford however, it had less to do with ideology and more to do with Carter’s promise never to lie to disillusioned Americans after Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
Legislative successes followed, but Carter angered Washington Democrats. Global inflation, unemployment and interest rates in the US rose and Carter’s popularity fell.
“Carter was never expected or accepted by the establishment,” said Joe Trippi, a member of Kennedy’s 1980 campaign.
Senator Ted Kennedy launched a primary challenge in 1980, inspiring young progressives like those who once adored their murdered older brothers. Carter famously said about Kennedy: “I’m going to kick his ass.” The president won enough delegates for the nomination even as the Iran hostage crisis worsened his problems.
However, in defeat, Kennedy used his convention speech more to awaken his own supporters than to reconcile with the incumbent. “The work continues, the cause endures… and the dream will never die,” declared Kennedy, exposing Carter’s weaknesses.
Against Republican Ronald Reagan, Carter won only six states and Washington, D.C.
Reagan won two general elections in a landslide, but the founding was his main challenge in 1976 against Ford.
A mild-mannered Michigander, Ford had a unique path to the White House. President Richard Nixon elevated him from House leadership to vice president in 1973 after corruption forced Spiro Agnew’s resignation. Ford ascended to the presidency a year later, when Nixon resigned because of Watergate.
Controversially, Ford pardoned Nixon. He faced inflation, high unemployment and choppy energy markets. And he had to prepare quickly to seek his own election, having never been part of a national campaign.
Ford came from the center right on Capitol Hill, a Republican group that had mostly accepted the expanded scope of the federal government since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Meanwhile, Reagan was cornering conservatives who never embraced FDR’s America and paled in the face of the Civil Rights Movement and social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1976 primaries, Ford won 27 races to Reagan’s 24. This gave the incumbent 1,121 delegates, just 43 more than the insurgent challenger. Reagan dominated most of the primaries in the South, the most conservative region of the country.
In the autumn campaign, a wounded Ford returned late against Carter but failed. Carter carried the South. And Reagan was positioned to take on the Republican mantle four years later.
Ford, Carter and Bush are not perfect parallels for 2024: Biden has not mounted a credible primary challenge and, even with the fallout from the debate, has a wellspring of personal goodwill throughout his party. Perhaps the best comparison, then, is Johnson.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination thrust Johnson into the Oval Office in November 1963. Known as LBJ, the colorful Texan defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. Johnson amassed the most sweeping legislative record since FDR: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid. But Johnson greatly expanded U.S. involvement in Vietnam — and lied to the country in the process. He also found himself unable to guide Americans through the social changes of the time.
Presidential campaigns were shorter then, so it wasn’t until March 31, 1968, that Johnson considered his flaccid position and announced his intentions. After poor results in the early primaries, which were not binding matters, Johnson said in a Oval Office Address“I will not seek and will not accept my party’s nomination for another term as its president.”
What followed, however, is not necessarily encouraging for Democrats hoping to hear the same from Biden.
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy – whose son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is putting together a independent presidential candidacy this year — joined a vigorous fight for the Democratic nomination and secured 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 noisy convention in Chicago – also the site of the 2024 Convention. They chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey to face Nixon, the former Republican vice president who had lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then dropped out of the California governor’s race in 1962.
Neither Nixon nor Humphrey were widely popular, and the resulting general election was close, with independent George Wallace the key factor. Nixon edged Humphrey by about 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast and secured 301 electoral votes.
Seven months after the resignation of a beleaguered Democratic president, his party has been defeated. The Republicans, with a president-elect who would one day resign in disgrace, had their comeback story.
