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Who is ahead in the US presidential campaign? Niall O’Dowd and Daniel Geary give their verdicts

Incumbent Joe Biden has been trailing Donald Trump in the polls. Can he turn it around in tonight’s first TV debate and how will the campaign play out from here?

The debate between President Joe Biden and challenger Donald Trump tonight will be the highest-stakes moment of their rematch. Photograph: Erin Schaff/New York Times

Niall O'Dowd
Daniel Geary
Thu Jun 27 2024 - 06:00

Niall O’Dowd: Biden will emerge on top by hammering home the threat Trump poses to democracy

Joe Biden is commencing his final election run at precisely the right moment. After months of negative polls, the tide is turning in his direction, a fact that becomes clearer by the day. His campaign modus operandi is simple. He is focusing on making Donald Trump the issue, as polls clearly indicate the “double haters” — voters who deeply dislike both candidates — are swinging to Biden. The election may come down to, not the bonniest baby, but the least ugly. So far that’s Trump.

A recent Fox News poll showed that among double-haters, Biden is ahead by 11 points in the two-way race. There was more good news in the poll for Biden. In the “most important issue” lane, “future of democracy” was rated the top concern of voters, with 68 per cent saying it mattered more to them than even the economy, which stood at 66 per cent.

Those figures have not arrived out of nowhere and reflect the damage done by the Trump court case, where he regularly excoriated pillars of American society, such as the FBI, public servants, the Justice Department, judges, juries and spouted Biden conspiracies that made him sound deranged at times. Americans caught in two minds on who to vote for could not ignore such tantrums and slander. The democracy issue was much lower down in earlier polls. Biden also led Trump in the Fox poll by two points, the first time he has led in a head-to-head poll since last October.

Up to now, the majority of polls have continuously favoured Trump, but there is evidence that polls are not reliable where Trump is concerned. Remember the red wave tsunami about to crash on to American shores according to the polls in 2022? Biden was unpopular and inflation was higher back then too. Incredibly, Democrats had their best midterms in decades.

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The pattern is clear. The GOP seeks to create the mindset that victory is inevitable — only for the Democrats, driven by issues such as abortion and the attacks on the constitution, to show up in larger numbers on election day. One other intriguing figure from the Fox poll shows Biden within four points in Florida where anger over the six weeks abortion policy is giving Democrats hope of an utter game changer. If Florida went blue, the election would be over.

The Biden camp has always claimed that once voters tuned into the race fully, they would drift towards Biden. Trump will respond with a farrago of lies and counteraccusations while Biden paints Trump as the most extreme candidate ever for the Oval Office. He will point out that not one of the 46 men elected president — whether they were magnificent or mediocre — ever challenged the very premise of democracy and the constitution as the foundation stone of the United States of America.

Presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Donald Trump debate tonight on CNN (9pm eastern time/2am Irish time). Photograph: Christian Monterrosa/Getty Images

In tonight’s CNN debate (9pm eastern time/2am Irish time) Biden intends to hammer home that message with rapid-fire questions. These include: who won the 2020 election? Will Trump accept the result of the 2024 election? Will he pardon those in jail including neo-Nazis for their roles on January 6th, 2021? Does he feel ashamed to be the first convicted felon president? Biden will campaign heavily on the fact that Trump has admitted he wants to destroy the constitution. “Trump calls for the termination of the constitution” was a CNN headline in December 2022.

Trump is a very dangerous opponent, however. Like Netanyahu in Israel, he will likely face prosecution if he loses. He will fight like a cornered rat as will his pygmy posse of Republican Party leaders who fawn over him.

Biden’s age has been a concern for some, but I am confident that he will rise to the occasion — he always has. People forget he was adjudged the winner in the two debates held in 2020. It may be his last rodeo, but folks who watched his last big public speech — the state of the union address in March — saw a man fired up, fearless and far from finished.

I predict Biden will win the debate. Then if he can begin his final five months with the bit between his teeth and a fair wind behind him, he will be difficult to stop.

Niall O’Dowd is founder of Irish America Magazine, IrishCentral.com and Irish Voice. He is a co-founder of the Irish American Democrats group and lives in New York

Daniel Geary: If the election was held today, Trump would win, but that may change as the campaign unfolds

If the American presidential election were held today, recently convicted felon Donald Trump would win. He and President Joe Biden are tied in the polls. But a tie favours Trump because the president is chosen via an absurdly archaic electoral college system that gives the edge to Republicans. In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 per cent but only narrowly prevailed in the electoral college. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 per cent but lost the election.

It is incredible that Biden is losing to a candidate as flawed and as unpopular as Trump. Less than 40 per cent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 55 per cent disapprove. That partly indicates a broad dissatisfaction with politics in general. But it also reflects Biden’s failings.

In economic terms, Biden has been the most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. But he has done a poor job of trumpeting his policies. Instead, he tries to convince the public that “Bidenomics” worked. For the majority of Americans who are suffering from rising costs of living and decades of stagnant wages, this is the wrong tack. You can’t convince struggling voters that they should be happy because economic indicators are strong. Instead, Biden should be selling his policies as part of an ambitious agenda that he would further enact if the public would return him and his party to power.

The ongoing horrific war in Gaza has fractured the Democratic Party. By backing Israel so strongly at the outset, Biden created a Frankenstein monster that he cannot control. Israel has rejected Biden’s recent efforts to secure a ceasefire. Because of this, many young voters and Arab-Americans may withhold votes that Biden desperately needs. Moreover, should the war continue, there are certain to be large protests at the Democratic convention in August. Especially if these are ruthlessly repressed, discontent with Biden on Gaza will only increase.

Biden is bleeding support from African Americans and Latinos, key Democratic constituencies. This gives him only a narrow path to victory in the electoral college. Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, swing states he won in 2020, will be difficult to retain this year, absent large majorities among these groups. If he loses in those states, then Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin become must-win. Polls show very close races in all three states.

But Biden will probably gain ground on Trump as the campaign unfolds. Trump’s conviction seems to have shifted the polls a bit. Trump has his own problems retaining support among some of his key Republican voters. Biden’s best path to victory is to remind voters — beginning in tonight’s debate — of all of Trump’s considerable defects. If this election becomes a referendum on Trump, Biden will win. But the election is essentially a coin flip. The website 538, which provides the most reliable electoral forecast, gives Biden a 0.2 per cent lead at present.

One thing is certain: there is no cause for complacency. A second Trump presidency would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the world. And a narrow Biden victory would hardly be anything to cheer about. If Biden wins, but only barely, Trump supporters will view him as having stolen the election. That would dramatically increase the chances of the kind of political violence we saw on January 6th, 2021. A decisive Biden victory is needed to ensure the election’s legitimacy and to give him the legislative majority required to enact his agenda. It is also the only way to shift the Republican Party away from Trumpism: by convincing it that it cannot win at the ballot box. That such a clear victory over such a clearly flawed candidate seems so unlikely is an indictment of Biden and his party for failing to present a popular alternative to Trumpism.

Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott Associate Professor in American History at Trinity College Dublin

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