If at least some trials take place in the run-up to the election, as seems likely, Trump will aim to turn the courts into the equivalent of stadium rallies: arenas for communicating with his base. The presidential race will become a courtroom drama, a historical emotional play in which he can portray himself as a MAGA martyr. “In the end, they're not coming for me, they're coming after you, and I'm just standing in their way,” he told a crowd last June. It's a wonderfully typical Trump formula, exploiting the persecution complex he shares with his supporters. Trump seeks to bypass the fact-based criminal justice system with an emotion-based political process.
Joe Biden on the campaign trail in Charleston, South Carolina, on Sunday. credit: AP
Trump's impeachment would help him win the Republican presidential nomination. But opinion polls indicate that convictions would harm his chances of regaining the presidency, although this would not, constitutionally, automatically disqualify him from running for office or holding office.
In assessing his electability, we naturally tend to focus on his MAGA followers, his sycophants on Capitol Hill, and the roughly 70% of Republicans who believe — without any factual basis — that Biden somehow “stole” the 2020 election. However, it is the 30 percent of Republicans who did not believe Trump's big lie who can decide the outcome of the election. They formed part of the plausible majority that asserted itself in the 2022 midterm congressional elections, when Trump-backed election deniers fared poorly, as did the Republican Party as a whole. Suburban women, in particular, have rejected Trump's insanity and ugliness, and they constitute a crucial swing demographic that regularly decides presidential elections.
However, a lot has happened in the eighteen months since those midterm elections. Biden is now 81, a year and a half older to begin with. He also has the worst approval rating of any president seeking re-election at this point in the election cycle.
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Also, January 6th is not fresh in the minds of voters. “As a campaign theme for Biden, I think the threat to democracy is a failure,” said Mitt Romney, a Republican senator and Trump critic. The New York Times. “Biden needs new material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”
The Biden campaign, not to mention the prosecutors in the January 6 cases against Trump, hope to remind voters of that day's countless horrors — even though the proceedings in the federal trials will not be televised, which may reduce… From its influence.
Moreover, for some Democratic voters, January 6 is now less important than October 7. For many Muslim voters, 83% of whom voted Democratic in 2020, Biden's support for Israel's brutal response is more motivating than Trump's Islamophobia. The Gaza war has become a major issue. While they won't necessarily end up voting for a former president who repeatedly pledged to ban Muslims from entering the United States, the problem for Biden is that they might boycott the election.
Within the multiracial, multigenerational coalition that secured Biden's victory four years ago, there are further signs of erosion. Trump polled unexpectedly well among young voters, as well as black and Latino men.
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Moreover, in 2024, disaffected voters have more options. Robert Kennedy Jr. is a fringe candidate, but he was born with the most valuable political asset: instant name recognition. African-American academic Cornel West, who is also running, could exploit resentment on campus. Green Party candidate Jill Stein — who did well enough in 2016 to deny victory to Hillary Clinton in vital battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — will run again.
Despite being attacked on multiple fronts, Biden should win the popular vote nationwide, as Democratic candidates have done in seven of the last eight presidential elections. But given the flaws of the Electoral College, designed by the Founding Fathers who feared what they called too much democracy, this will not be enough – as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton attest.
I still want to believe that America has a reasonable majority alert to the dangers Trump poses to democracy. But the big question in 2024 is whether these voters will outnumber Trump supporters in the six key battleground states where America's future will be decided.
Nick Bryant, former BBC correspondent in Washington, is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.
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