by President Biden is advancing toward the Democratic nomination. Former President Donald J. Trump could start getting the nod from his party within days.
America’s response: This can’t be real.
Even as both men walk toward likely summer coronations and a fall rematch, an undercurrent of disbelief runs through the country. Many Republicans see Biden as so politically and physically weak that they believe his party will replace him. Many Democrats cannot imagine Trump winning another nomination while he faces 91 felony charges and four criminal trials.
This disbelief, ranging from casual doubt to conspiratorial denial, has been hidden behind a year of polls showing a deeply bleak public mood, and has emerged in dozens of interviews over the past two weeks, as well as in recent statements of candidates and political commentators.
“They will make a change at the last minute,” David Lage, a Republican missionary from Spring Hill, Iowa, said of the Democrats. “They’ve tried all the other dirty tricks.”
Paige Leary of Exeter, NH, an independent who voted for Biden in 2020 and for Democrats in previous presidential elections, also questioned whether Trump would be the Republican nominee.
“The jury is out,” he said. “We don’t know what will happen legally with Trump.”
These contrasting views reflect how doubts about Biden and Trump have different origins in each party.
For Republicans, declining trust in the political system is the dominant issue. The party is nearly a decade into the Trump era, and misinformation and conspiratorial thinking about Biden’s health and the Democratic conspiracy to replace him is rife in conservative media and the political world at large. A favorite, and totally unfounded, theory is that Michelle Obama will take her place in a Democratic coup.
Democrats, for their part, are consumed by the heartbreaking hope that Trump is not the nominee. They’re crossing their fingers that his legal cases or their efforts to disqualify him from office through the 14th Amendment will keep him out of the polls. Most hold out little hope that his nomination could be derailed; They simply cling to the belief that a man they detest will somehow disappear.
In the muddy middle are also the more casual voters who are not yet paying attention to an election that is almost a year away, but believe that the nation will surely find someone new.
“People from both parties really don’t like the other’s likely nominee,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll. He said he had heard enough people suggest that Trump and Biden would be displaced that he included a question about it in the polls he is conducting this month.
“Voters who think, ‘Oh my God, let’s not repeat 2020,’ will realize we’re tuning into another episode,” Franklin said. “Same characters, similar plot. Get used to it.”
The Biden campaign’s internal data has found that nearly three-quarters of its so-called universe of target voters do not believe Trump is the Republican nominee. Those voters are a broad set of Americans who are not connected to the news and do not currently support the president’s re-election, but the campaign believes they can be persuaded to do so.
But Biden and his team face a barrage of wild speculation from Republicans.
“Personally, I don’t think he’ll make it,” Trump said of Biden. on Fox News last month. Mr. DeSantis suggested in a Fox News town hall event last week that Democrats “could replace him with someone else.”
Commentator Megyn Kelly put forward the theory about Mrs. Obama on his podcast last week, and right-wing host Tomi Lahren said on his Web show Wednesday that Democrats would replace Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
“I continue to predict, as I have for more than two years, that Michelle Obama will be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2024,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Trump adviser. aware on social media a week before the Iowa caucuses.
Although Mrs. Obama has repeatedly ruled out any presidential interest, OddsChecker, an online sportsbook, on Friday gave almost equal odds to win the presidential election with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who came third in Iowa on Monday. They were both behind Trump and Biden. The site placed Newsom in fifth place, well ahead of DeSantis.
Many of these beliefs come from the Trump-inspired right, which has trafficked in all kinds of false claims about the 2020 election and is willing to believe that the solution will be available again by 2024. The general and strange notion is that the Party Democrat is acting according to the whims of the “deep state” and has already drawn up his plan to replace Biden.
And there are conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories.
Several Republicans interviewed in recent presidential campaigns repeated a decade-old anti-transgender falsehood about Obama propagated by disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“I think Michelle Obama (or Michael Obama) will be the ultimate choice for Democrats,” said Sue Grove, a secretary from Van Meter, Iowa, who works for Republican lawmakers at the Iowa State Capitol and supported businessman Vivek Ramaswamy for the presidency before he was elected president. she abandoned. “I’ve also heard rumors about Oprah. “I don’t know how Biden was able to get back in.”
Far-right circles online are also rife with unfounded theories that Democrats could bring about an untimely death for the 81-year-old president. Mrs. Grove alluded darkly to that idea: “You know, there are a lot of suspicious deaths of Democrats, sudden deaths,” she said. “There are a lot of suicides, right?”
Another guess is not so violent.
Some Republicans predict Biden will be unseated at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago. They point out that in 2020, top Democrats quickly rallied behind Biden to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and insist it wouldn’t be so far-fetched to see the party now turn against its politically vulnerable president.
“I don’t think Biden will hold up,” said Amy Meyer, a Republican data analyst who served as Iowa caucus captain for DeSantis. “The Democrats have their superdelegates and that is why they do not have a democratic primary process. So I think they will do what they want.”
At least one former U.S. senator feels the same way.
“I don’t think Biden is going to run,” said Judd Gregg, a moderate Republican who represented New Hampshire in the House for nearly two decades and also served as the state’s governor. “He will remain until April, when he has the delegates, and then will elect a successor.”
When asked who that successor could be, Gregg said it couldn’t be Vice President Kamala Harris because he considered her “ineligible.” He suggested Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan instead.
No prominent Democrat has argued that Trump will not be the Republican nominee. In fact, part of Biden’s immediate problem in the polls, his advisers say, is that voters who don’t like Trump haven’t realized how likely he is to win the nomination.
The left, alarmed at the prospect of a second Trump presidency, is looking to the legal system for salvation, hoping that prosecutors will put an end to their political juggernaut. Or, if not a criminal jury, then perhaps the Supreme Court, which Democrats hope will uphold two states’ decisions to exclude Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
“There seems to be a massive hoax about Trump,” said Bill Schafer, a renewable energy executive from Boulder, Colorado, who described himself as a former Republican who voted for Biden in 2020. He said he had been unable to accept that the Republicans would nominate Trump.
“I turned on Fox News to see: What does it feel like to live in this world?” he said. “This is a combination of The National Enquirer and professional wrestling. If you can believe in those two things, then MAGA is a piece of cake.”
Convincing voters that Trump will be on the ballot in November is, in fact, critical to Biden’s election strategy. Campaign officials say his political standing will improve once the reality of Trump’s likely renomination sets in and voters no longer follow the race closely.
“This is not something hypothetical,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “The president hopes to spend the next 10 months reminding the American people how dangerous Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda are.”
And then there are the voters who are still trying to wish for some other showdown in 2024.
Yoram Ariely, a wealthy Democrat retired from the import and export of fruit juice concentrates, took charge of commission a survey in October of SurveyUSA asks voters if they would prefer Biden abandon his presidential campaign and run for vice president.
Using that biased and implausible question, the poll found that among 1,024 Democrats, 69 percent believed Biden would do better if he tried to regain the office he held for eight years while Barack Obama was president.
Ariely said he had subsidized the poll to help persuade Biden and other Democrats that the president should find something to do besides seek re-election. So far, that proposal has not had much acceptance.
“If he resigned clearly and cleanly, that would be best,” said Ariely, who divides his time between upstate New York and Florida. “My suggestion is that you do the right thing and find an exit ramp.”
The report was contributed by Shane Goldmacher, Jonathan Weisman, Neil Vigdor and Alicia McFadden.
