President Biden used his annual State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night to kick off the U.S. presidential election of 2024 with a barnstorming speech designed to take head-on the clear majority of Americans — including a majority in his own Democratic Party — who think he’s too old to run again.
The punchy delivery and rabble-rousing content had one overriding purpose: to defy his army of critics by leaving them in no doubt that he’s going nowhere, that he intends to run for re‑election in November and to win a second term, even if he will be 86 by the end of it.
By that yardstick it was a success.
The growing rumble from Democratic election strategists that it was time for Biden, increasingly gaffe-prone and doddery in public, to make way for a younger man or woman has been silenced, at least for now. The White House thinks an incipient ‘Dump Biden’ movement is dead.
Biden confounded critics with his punchy delivery and rabble-rousing content
But one heckler yells to interrupt President Joe Biden as he delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress
With Donald Trump unstoppable as the rival candidate after sweeping the board (bar Vermont) in Super Tuesday’s clutch of Republican primaries, America is heading for the Biden v. Trump rematch that most voters do not want — indeed are dismayed by.
The State of the Union address is usually quite a dignified, somewhat bipartisan affair, in which the President speaks as the head of state, and not just as the political leader of the governing party.
But there was nothing dignified about Biden’s performance on Thursday night. From the get-go it was a highly partisan, divisive stump speech more appropriate for the campaign trail than for a President meant to be speaking to the nation about the State of the Union.
It was distinctly unpresidential, more like the highly political speeches British party leaders give to their annual party conferences.
But it was delivered with verve and force (even if, at times, it descended into the unintelligible as he slurred words which clattered out of his mouth too quickly), which is why Democrats were delighted by it.
He even gave as good as he got when he taunted Republican hecklers, without managing to lose his place. Sleepy Joe was having the night off. This was ‘Jacked-Up Joe’, as one U.S. TV pundit put it.
Biden had no choice but to show there was life in the old dog yet, for his polling figures are truly dire. His approval rating is under water at below 40 per cent.
No U.S. president has been re-elected with approval ratings that low at this stage in the political cycle. Only Jimmy Carter’s ratings were as bad, and he was the last one-term Democratic president, thumped by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A poll in January for NBC News, which is virtually the broadcast arm of the Democrats, found that 73 per cent of voters think the country is heading in the wrong direction. Only 19 per cent think their children will fare better than they have, which is grim for a country built on optimism.
Trump has commanding leads over Biden on all the issues which will determine an election outcome, according to a recent New York Times poll.
Biden was triumphant about the economy, but voters don’t share his rosy view
The president poses for a selfie after his final address before the November election
He is 57 per cent to 22 per cent ahead on securing the border (illegal immigration, out of control, is now the number one issue for most voters); 55 per cent to 33 per cent think he will do a better job on the economy; 46 per cent to 23 per cent see him as more up to the job than Biden; and 50 per cent to 22 per cent believe he will do better on crime, which is perceived as having been allowed to fester under Biden.
When I arrived in New York on Wednesday night, the news was just breaking that the state governor was deploying the National Guard to assist the NYPD in coping with the epidemic of crime in the city’s subway system.
When a Republican senator suggested using the Guard to deal with the widespread urban unrest and criminality in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, Democrats had a fit of the vapours and said such an idea was beyond the pale.
Now it’s the policy of a Democratic governor in the country’s biggest Democratic city.
It all plays to Trump’s agenda: the sense that the fabric of U.S. society is fraying on so many fronts under the tutelage of a political elite that doesn’t seem to care. Shoplifting has become a plague, its perpetrators seemingly able to steal with impunity.
Venture into a pharmacy to make a few purchases, as I did yesterday morning, and you quickly discover that anything of value is under lock and key. To get there, you pass streets populated by the homeless, many suffering from serious mental illness. Some city centres are dotted with tented compounds.
The inability of the Biden administration to control the southern border, with illegal migrants arriving in their millions, adds to the sense of decay and threat.
It explains why the country is in a sour mood, despite the economy being in better shape than any other major market economy in the West.
Biden was triumphalist about the economy on Thursday, but voters don’t share his rosy view. Biden’s people cannot fathom why a strong economy is not boosting his re-election chances.
The main reason is that inflation is still hurting. Yes, it has come down far and fast, but previous price rises are baked in. Prices are not falling — they’re just not rising as fast as they were. On average they are still 19 per cent higher than when Biden came to power. Food is 24 per cent more expensive, the price of fuelling your car is still high by U.S. standards, and residential rental costs are 30 per cent up since the pandemic.
That is why voters don’t see the economy in quite the same way as Biden. Most think it was better under Trump. Even a growing number of blacks and Hispanics agree.
Yet it is not all going Trump’s way. Though he saw off his rival Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, without breaking into a sweat, exit polls showed that a fair chunk of registered Republicans who voted for her will not vote for Trump come November.
Normally when a candidate has won the party’s nomination, they move towards the centre to scoop up precisely these kind of voters. But that is not Trump’s way. He likes to stay in the comfort zone of his MAGA cult.
Democrats console themselves that Trump’s vote has a ceiling — and it’s under 50 per cent, largely because a clear majority of suburban women, the biggest swing demographic in the country, will not vote for him.
But this ignores the fact that Trump doesn’t need 50 per cent of the national vote to win. He just needs to win a majority of the six swing states that will determine the election — and at the moment he is ahead in all of them.
Trump’s campaign managers were happy with Biden’s performance on Thursday because they think it consolidates his grip on the Democratic nomination — and they’re convinced he’s the candidate they can beat.
Trump’s campaign managers think Biden’s performance consolidates his grip on the Democratic nomination — and they’re convinced he’s the candidate they can beat
Their worst nightmare is that Biden for some reason — perhaps due to what is euphemistically called a ‘health event’ — will step down before the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.
This would then become what’s known as a brokered convention, which is likely to be very messy, but from which a new, younger candidate (almost certainly not Kamala Harris) would emerge.
By then it would be too late for the Republicans (whose convention is in July) to junk their own geriatric and go for someone younger themselves.
As things stand, there is no sign Biden is inclined to remove himself from the fray. Thursday night will have emboldened him to stay the course. But it cannot be ruled out if events beyond his control unfold.
A brokered Democratic convention really would throw a spanner in the works. All bets on the outcome in November would be off.
But without such a development, this week will have proved pivotal: Super Tuesday and the State of the Union address have cast the die for the shape of the 2024 U.S. election. It is a dismal prospect.