ATLANTA– There is great concern among Democrats about whether 81-year-old President Joe Biden is up to the task of defeating Donald Trump.
Past presidential campaigns offer lessons. None provide cause for optimism.
Going back to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, several presidents up for re-election faced significant challenges in the primaries or questions about whether to run again. George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford went on to win their nominations, only to be defeated in November. Johnson chose to withdraw — and the Democrats lost anyway.
Biden didn’t have a real primary battle. But his allies now recognize how bad the president performed in his debate against Trump. They have privately frustrated on Biden’s ability to serve until he is 86, and, more directly, whether he can keep his job through the Republican former president — a 78-year-old himself who is saddled with a conviction for a crimeother allegations and concerns from voters 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.
An Episcopalian student with an Ivy League education, Shrub was a moderate Republican and was never a favorite of the Christian right or of anti-tax, anti-small-government activists.
Bush appealed to the right wing before his 1988 victory, saying: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” He was at a high point in 1990 after a swift U.S. military victory had driven 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 speech at the GOP convention to enlist religious conservatives in a “culture war” against Clinton, liberals and secularism — standard Republican rhetoric today, but a more divisive tone next to Bush’s talk of a “kinder, gentler” country.
Democratic challenger and governor of Arkansas. Bill Clinton hammered Bush as someone out of touch with the American middle class. And billionaire Ross Perot entered the race as an independent.
On Election Day, 62.6% of voters voted against Bush. Clinton won 370 electoral votes, the second highest number for a 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 was less about ideology, however, and more about Carter’s promise never to lie to Americans disillusioned after 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 challenged in a primary in 1980, inspiring young progressives like 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 speech at convention more to galvanize his own supporters than to reconcile with the sitting president. “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 six states and Washington, D.C.
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 Michigander, had a unique path to the White House. President Richard Nixon promoted him from House leadership to vice president in 1973 after corruption forced Spiro Agnew to resign. Ford rose to the presidency a year later when Nixon resigned because of 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.
Ford, Carter and Bush aren’t perfect parallels for 2024: Biden failed to mount a credible primary challenge and, even with the fallout from the debate, he has a well of personal goodwill within his party. Perhaps the best comparison, then, is Janssen.
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 affairs, Johnson said in a Address of the Oval Office“I will not seek and will not accept my party’s nomination for another term as your president.”
What happened next, however, was hardly encouraging for Democrats hoping to hear the same from Biden.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, whose son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is campaigning independent presidential candidacy 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.
The Democrats held a noisy convention in Chicago, also the site of the Convention 2024They 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.
