Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 3 (Reporter Sun Ding Xiong Maoling) On February 3, South Carolina will hold the first official Democratic Party primary for the 2024 presidential election. The US media and experts believe that the current President Biden, who is seeking re-election, is currently in a solid position within the Democratic Party, and the primary election is basically just a "formality" for him. Judging from the current Republican party election, Biden may face off against former US President and Republican Trump again in the November election, repeating the situation of the 2020 election. Public opinion is concerned that this may further deepen the political polarization and social rift in the United States, and increase the risk of political instability in the United States.
There are many challenges in running for re-election
Biden officially announced his re-election candidacy in April last year. He currently has two challengers in the party, Congressman Dean Phillips and writer Marianna Williamson. Biden led the two men by a wide margin in the polls. Public opinion generally believes that Biden will once again become the Democratic presidential candidate, but he will face multiple challenges on the road to re-election.
The first is that Biden's approval rating is not high. After the hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, public negative evaluations of Biden's performance in office rose. In addition, the United States has suffered the highest inflation in decades since Biden took office, the number of illegal immigrants has surged, and the recent "border crisis" has been violently fermented, and its approval rating has now fallen below 40%. American political scientist David Axelrod believes that the sluggish approval rating has cast a shadow over Biden's re-election campaign.
The second is that Biden is in the midst of an impeachment inquiry initiated by House Republicans. American public opinion believes that although the impeachment case is unlikely to bring Biden out of office, and even to a certain extent, it will help him consolidate his party support and absorb more political donations, but it will inevitably involve his energy and may affect his personal image. As the CNN article put it, the dispute will put "tremendous pressure" on Biden's re-election bid.
Biden's opponents also play a role in his age. At 81 years old, Biden is the oldest sitting president in U.S. history. In response, Phillips commented that Biden "cannot fulfill his presidential duties in the way that the United States needs." The Biden campaign argues that age is not a burden but an advantage, representing experience and qualifications.
Focus on recreating the "South Carolina Recovery"
Four years ago, Biden had a poor start to the Democratic primaries in the 2020 presidential election, but rebounded in South Carolina before winning the party's nomination and eventually being elected president. The state was then dubbed by the US media as a place of Biden's "political recovery". Biden bluntly said in the election campaign a few days ago that without Democratic voters in South Carolina, he would not become the president of the United States. At his appeal, the Democratic National Committee decided to hold the party's first formal primary in 2024 in the state.
South Carolina, though, has traditionally been a Republican-dominated "red state." During the 2020 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump won the state by nearly 12 percentage points, and it will not be easy for Biden to win the state in this year's election. However, the Biden campaign is still investing a lot of money and manpower here, one important reason is that there are a large number of African-American Democratic voters in the state, and this group is very important for Biden's re-election campaign.
According to the White House, Biden is committed to promoting racial equity and creating economic opportunity for African-American families and communities. The New York Times article argues that the Democratic Party is trying to test whether its policy propositions are effective in appealing to African-American voters in South Carolina to see if this campaign strategy can be applied to other areas where African-American voters are concentrated.
What worries Democratic campaign strategists is that Biden's approval rating among African-American voters has slipped recently, and his approval rating among Hispanic and young voters has even been overtaken by Trump. According to US media reports, Biden plans to boost his support among African-Americans and Hispanics by visiting minority communities more. In terms of winning young people's votes, the Biden team considered Latin American singer Taylor Swift as its platform.
Beit Refight was not welcome
On the Republican side, although Trump has not yet shaken off the controversy over his candidacy and multiple criminal cases involving him are still ongoing, he is making a big run in the party primary, and public opinion generally believes that his re-nomination as the Republican presidential nominee may only be a matter of time. This means that the 2024 presidential election in the United States may once again become a showdown between Trump and Biden, as it did in 2020.
According to a recent joint poll conducted by the website of the "Decision-making Desk Headquarters" and the "News Nation" TV channel, nearly 60 percent of registered voters surveyed in the United States are "not very enthusiastic" or "not at all enthusiastic" about a possible second showdown between Trump and Biden. Randy Johnson, a 64-year-old Republican voter in Missouri, said he wanted a third option, but that didn't work under the current political system in the United States, and that he felt sorry for his country, "We have to choose the lesser of two evils."
After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede defeat and repeatedly claimed that there was large-scale fraud in the election, which laid the groundwork for the subsequent "Capitol Hill riot". The series of political and legal disputes triggered by the riots have continued to "add fuel to the fire" of partisanship and political division in the United States in the past few years.
In recent times, Biden and Trump's teams have stepped up their attacks on each other, accusing each other of being a "threat to American democracy." The Associated Press published an article saying that the two men fighting again may "shake American politics" and pose a far-reaching challenge to "the future of American democracy."
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, commented: "Voters may already have an idea of how those who will be in the White House in the next four years will behave, but it's completely unclear how a divided nation will react to the winning side." Refusal to accept, disruption, further tearing and even violence seem likely. ”