President Biden said while out shopping in Nantucket, Mass., on Saturday that he wasn’t having any conversations about whether he will run for reelection.
“We’re not having any, we’re celebrating!” Biden said when asked about his 2024 conversations as he exited a clothing store in downtown Nantucket while honoring Small Business Saturday.
Biden and White House aides have repeatedly indicated the president intends to run for reelection, but he has not yet made a formal announcement.
Biden had said he would use some time over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with his family to make a final decision.
He made the latest remark as he gathered in Nantucket with much of his family for the holiday weekend.
As Biden continued shopping on Saturday, he was asked about a dinner Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago property with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes after Trump announced his campaign.
“You don’t want to hear what I think,” Biden responded.
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The only other formidable contender
Gov. Gavin Newsom has won three elections in five years in America’s largest state, is apoplectic about his party’s messaging defects and follows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the right-wing media ecosystem with a zeal that would put some opposition researchers to shame.
But Newsom wants the word to go forth: He’s not going to challenge President Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024.
“I’ve told everyone in the White House, from the chief of staff to the first lady,” he recounted to me as we sat on the top floor of California’s now-ceremonial governor’s mansion on election night.
His message to Ron Klain and Jill Biden over the summer — when he visited Washington amid growing speculation, and considerable West Wing irritation, that he was plotting a primary challenge — was to count him as a firm supporter of Biden’s reelection: “I’m all in, count me in,” he said he told them.
Newsom relayed the same to Biden himself on election night.
After spending much of the evening with family, aides and supporters at the governor’s mansion watching the surprisingly strong returns for Democrats, the governor dashed over to a Sacramento hotel to briefly celebrate his own landslide reelection and trumpet the approval of a ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in California’s constitution.
“We affirmed clearly with conviction that we are a true freedom state,” Newsom told reporters. He contrasted California, and himself, with book and abortion banning governors in other states who also won reelection but remained nameless. Or at least they did explicitly so, until Newsom alluded to the one “flying migrants to an island.”
It would seem to have all the makings of classic political preview, a coming attraction as they would say 400 miles down the 5. Here was the freshly-reelected, next-generation Democrat of one mega-state standing with his young family and calling out the freshly-reelected, next-generation Republican of another mega-state a few hours after DeSantis claimed victory on stage with his young family.
The 2024 showdown, it would seem, was on.
But this is Sacramento not Hollywood. And today’s political culture, particularly among Democrats, isn’t the stuff of Aaron Sorkin pictures.
So after addressing the cameras, Newsom found himself standing outside his motorcade on a chilly-for-California night, speaking on his cell phone and telling the soon-to-be-80-year-old president, worry not, he was on board.
“I’m all in; put me in coach,” Newsom told Biden. “We have your back.”
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Former President Trump met a muted response from many Republicans when he launched his 2024 White House bid at Mar-A-Lago this month.
But his campaign is stirring excitement, and even some glee, from Democrats.
Members of President Biden’s party are openly pining for Trump to become the 2024 Republican nominee, believing he is just too flawed to win a general election.
They argue that the situation today is markedly different from 2016, not least because voters now know what they get with Trump in office. And Democrats are eager to have such a beatable opponent in an election that is likely to be challenging for their party.
“I am hoping for Trump’s nomination, ‘cause I think he’s the easiest candidate to beat,” former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D) told “The Briefing with Steve Scully” on SiriusXM this week.
Dean, a presidential candidate in 2004 and subsequently the head of the Democratic National Committee, noted that he had warned his party in 2016 that Trump could win the presidency.
Now, he insisted: “People are sick of this. They’re tired of the inflammatory stuff, they’re tired of the divisiveness, they’re tired of the lies. If Trump gets the nomination, I think we have got a pretty good chance of turning over some more states than we did the last time.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told The New York Times recently that even though he thought a Trump candidacy would be “an absolute horror show” for the health of American democracy, it would be “probably a good thing” for those who want Republicans to lose in 2024.
Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh told this column that Trump is “infinitely weaker than he was.”
“You can always get burned by making some of these predictions, but I just think he seems a little bit of a spent force,” Longabaugh said. “There are a whole bunch of dynamics that are very different from 2016.”
Even some on the right believe the Democrats have a point.
An editorial from The Wall Street Journal the day before Trump’s campaign launch savaged his chances in 2024, lamenting that after the 2020 election, “the country showed it wants to move on but Mr. Trump refuses — perhaps because he can’t admit to himself that he was a loser.”
The Journal’s editorial asserted that if Trump did press ahead with his campaign, “Republican voters will have to decide if they want to nominate the man most likely to produce a GOP loss and total power for the progressive left.”
Democrats and Trump-skeptical Republicans believe that the GOP has other candidates who could either be more persuasive to center-ground voters in a general election — or at least bring less baggage into the race than Trump.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is just as confrontational as Trump but not dogged by the same degree of indiscipline, nor by legal troubles — and he just won reelection in his usually competitive state by 19 points.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) was elected in a Democratic-leaning state in 2021, just a year after Biden had carried it by 10 points over Trump.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants and the leading female contender for the GOP in 2024, would offer a much more inclusive face of the party.
Of course, Democrats — and pundits — have underestimated Trump before, most notably in 2016.
His candidacy was treated as a self-promotional gambit or a joke in many places. The Huffington Post at one point ostentatiously announced it would move coverage of his bid to the “Entertainment” section of its website. Various Democrats pronounced that Trump had no chance of winning.
Everyone knows how that turned out.
Now, however, the argument that Trump is the weakest link has several new threads.
Firstly, even though the former president retains the fervent support of his base, he is unpopular with the public at large.
An Economist-YouGov poll conducted from Nov. 13-15 found that Trump was viewed favorably by 77 percent of Republican voters but by only 41 percent of the overall population. Fifty-two percent of all adults had an unfavorable view of him — notably higher than the other potential GOP contenders the poll tested.