Two Political Presidential Outcomes for 2024
By: Quardricos Driskell, Columnist
Less than a year before Election Day, both parties believe they can win the White House and control both chambers of Congress, underscoring the high stakes for our country over the next 12 months.
It is no secret that Former President Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. However, with nary a vote cast in Iowa or New Hampshire, there is still time for a strong challenger to emerge from the pack of candidates chasing him. The GOP presidential race will pit the contest’s winner against a seemingly vulnerable President Biden, whose approval ratings have the Republicans thinking it can end his presidency at one term.
Thus, the country is seeing a repeat of 2020. Here are my two political prognostications for 2024.
1) Donald Trump, this time around, is the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges. Thus, given that the two indictments are on state charges and two are on federal charges, these indictments amount to 91 felony charges. I am not an attorney, but if Trump is charged before the election, his attorneys could advise him to stop his third campaign for president and drop out of the race so that he could avoid prison time. This is further complicated that the Supreme Court announced they will hear an appeal that could impact the Justice Department’s criminal trial on the charges related to January 6.
If, for some reason, Trump drops out of the race, which I doubt, especially after his, “I want to be a dictator for one day” – a prime example of how politics and reality TV have come full circle. And parenthetically, some Republicans have dismissed Trump’s line as a joke and “typical Trump rhetoric.” It would be easy to agree and sum all of this as hyperbole if so much of it hadn’t come from Trump and his allies before and if he hadn’t tried so much of it already during his term in office. His exit– given her debate performance and poll ratings, the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley could secure the GOP nomination and eventually win the presidency.
2) Meanwhile, President Biden is experiencing low approval ratings from every demographic in the Democratic base. Biden’s immediate and decisive show of support for Israel following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas appears to have turned off many within the Democratic base, most especially Arab, Muslims, Palestinians, and Jewish Americans, resulting in Democrats’ worst assessment of the president since he took office. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes at a time when Americans remain pessimistic about the economy, and the future of the federal republic governed by an oxygenation. Furthermore, the Biden administration continues to struggle to deal with increasing numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country, and debate rages about how much aid to provide to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Former President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod recently said in, a Wall Street Journal poll showing President Biden’s approval rating hitting a new low is “very, very dark” for Biden’s reelection campaign.
President Biden’s potential doom is similar to that of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
As 1968 dawned, President Johnson had every expectation that he would receive the Democratic Party’s nomination that summer to serve a second four-year term and then cruise to re-election. But after announcing the ceasing of the U.S. bombing of Vietnam, he decided not to seek the Democratic party’s nomination, ultimately resulting in Richard Nixon becoming president. As such, might President Biden be willing to step aside and allow his party to go in a different direction for the nomination – again ultimately resulting in Nikki Haley becoming the first woman and South Asian American president?
Despite these two potentially piteous options, democracies don’t exist automatically. Democracy is an idea we argue into being and must work to keep. That requires reaffirming the value of democracy and speaking out against those who try to score political points by undermining it.
In our world, we are witnessing a global movement that casts doubt on democracies and casts ballots against them. We are also seeing the fragility of our American democracy. As we close out 2023, I caution all of us to seriously consider who we choose as the leader of the United States of America. Lest we forget the famous words of Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Reverend Professor Quardricos Bernard Driskell, a federal lobbyist, an adjunct professor of religion and politics at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, and pastor of the historic Beulah Baptist Church in Alexandria, VA. Follow him on Twitter @q_driskell4
