Joe Biden likely isn’t as strong as he seems in Democratic primaries

By Matthew Gagnon

What, if anything, can we learn from what we have seen in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries thus far?

It is a fairly interesting question to ask, because this primary season is fairly unprecedented and both sides have been largely uncompetitive. On the Democratic side, we have an incumbent president with token (at best) competition, while on the Republican side we have a former president running once again, taking on strong but limited competition.

Both candidates are essentially waltzing to their respective party’s nomination. In Michigan’s primary Tuesday, Joe Biden received 81.1 percent of the vote, with 13.3 percent of primary-goers choosing “uncommitted,” largely as a protest against Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. This was Biden’s fourth consecutive easy win, after he earned 63.9 percent of the vote in New Hampshire (despite not being on the ballot), more than 96 percent in South Carolina, and 89.3 percent in Nevada.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump captured 68.2 percent of the vote in Michigan, while Nikki Haley, his only remaining challenger, only received 26.6 percent. Before that, Trump won 51 percent of the vote in Iowa, 54.3 percent in New Hampshire, virtually everything in Nevada and 59.8 percent of the vote in Haley’s home state of South Carolina. 

I’ve been having a running argument about what all of this means with a Democratic friend of mine. His contention is that these primaries, while they have different dynamics within them, are indications of the relative strength of the nominees within their own primary. Trump, to him, is demonstrating that the Republican Party has a significant anti-Trump contingent, which is completely done with Trump as the party’s standard bearer and is unlikely to vote for him in the general election. Biden, by contrast, is commanding 80 or 90 percent in primaries, proving Democrats are far more unified than the Republicans.

There are interesting points in there, but ultimately I disagree with the assessment. The problem with the analysis is that the protest vote in the Republican Party and the protest vote in the Democratic Party are not equivalent. Given that, it is hard to really compare them. 

On the Democratic side you have a current incumbent running against no one. When Democratic incumbents run essentially unopposed for reelection campaigns, the results tend to look very much like what we have seen for Biden. Barack Obama, for instance, won 81 percent of the vote in New Hampshire in 2012, while Bill Clinton won 84 percent there in 1996. 

As for Trump and the Republicans, in this case you have a completely different contest, with a former president returning to run again, which is in and of itself almost unprecedented in modern American politics. We do not really have anything comparable to contrast his performance against, as presidents who are defeated in their reelection campaign tend to simply retire. Gerald Ford made general rumblings about trying it in 1980, but ultimately decided not to run. Prior to that, the last former president to actually try again was Herbert Hoover, and that was in an entirely different political era of smoke-filled back rooms and party conventions. 

Ultimately, Trump still commands significant affection within the Republican Party, but does have a large opposition as well, and as such he attracted multiple high-profile candidates that ran against him, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Haley. 

To really consider them against each other, though, you would have to imagine a primary in which Biden was facing off against similar candidates in the Democratic primary. Imagine, for instance, if the primary attracted the Democratic equivalent of DeSantis, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and the equivalent of Haley, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. 

The question now becomes, how would Biden be doing against those two candidates in a contested primary where both opponents had significant resources?

The honest answer is, of course, we don’t really know, but there aren’t many people who believe that Biden would be winning as easily as Trump is in his primary. There is a palpable sense of unease among Democrats about Biden being the nominee, and I suspect that a candidate like Newsome or Whitmer could actually beat him in that primary. If not, Biden would prevail by much smaller margins. 

If that suspicion is true, which side is really more unified? In the end, we don’t really know that either, because the deciding factor will be the degree to which the unhappy minority in each party shows up to begrudgingly vote for their party’s nominee in November.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.