A rare analyst to have glimpsed Hillary Clinton’s defeats against Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Marie-Christine Bonzom has covered seven presidential elections and five presidencies. At the invitation of Dutyshe occasionally puts her expert eye on the 2024 presidential campaign.
As the primary ballots, the first major cog in the mechanism of a US presidential election, begin on Monday, Americans are very concerned about the state of their democracy.
Poll after poll shows that “democracy” is a priority topic for the vast majority of Americans. According to a study for the Associated Press, it is their biggest worry, second only to the economy. The Gallup Institute also finds that democracy issues are the non-economic problem most often mentioned by Americans. According to the Associated Press, only 10% of Americans think their democracy is working well.
More specifically in the Gallup study, problems relating to “poor leaders” and “government” (in the American sense of the term, namely executive, legislative and judicial combined) are the number one priority (19% of respondents), ahead of immigration (15%), “the economy in general” (13%) and inflation (10%), and very far ahead of racism, firearms or abortion, three subjects which, well that occupy a large space in political and media discourse, are only cited by 3% of respondents or less.
Furthermore, Americans report a record loss of confidence in the institutions essential to a democracy. According to Gallup, which has observed the downward trend of this index since 1979, well before the emergence of social networks or Donald Trump, Americans’ confidence in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, criminal justice and the so-called media traditional media (understood as news print media and television news channels) reached its lowest level in 2022 and 2023.
Gallup finally finds that 63% of respondents now agree with the statement that “the Democratic and Republican parties do not adequately represent the people” and “are doing such a poor job that a large third party is necessary.” A record since 2003, when the institute began asking this question. In addition, more than 80% of Americans want significant reform of their political system, or even a complete overhaul for 42% of them.
The powers that are the executive, the legislative, the judiciary and the media are therefore experiencing a serious crisis of representativeness and legitimacy.
The democratic crisis is accompanied by a deep disavowal of the two major powers, those who dominate the political and electoral system as well as the four powers through their elected officials, their political appointments and their other allies.
The two dominant parties are, in fact, declining. In terms of preferences expressed by Americans, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which have never exceeded 36% support since 1988, only garner the support of 27% of respondents each.
In fact, Americans who do not identify as Democrats or Republicans form the majority category of the electorate, and have done so without interruption since 2009. Today, 43% say they are independent.
With the current presidential campaign, the disavowal of the Republican and Democratic parties is coupled with a rejection of the two men who embody the sclerosis of American bipartisanship.
This democratic crisis should have urgently, and for a long time, called into question the political class which controls access to and maintenance of power. But, instead of responding to the almost existential concern of the American people about their democracy, the dominant parties are trying to impose Joe Biden and Donald Trump, candidates that the majority of voters no longer want since at least August 2021.
To make these candidates win, the dominant parties use all the usual and possible means in the states they control, an American presidential election being a collection of local ballots in the 50 states and the capital, and not a ballot organized at the national level. .
First, each dominant party works to hinder external competition from the other major party, third parties or independent candidates, in particular through the gerrymandering of constituencies and the requirements relating to voter signatures necessary for the inclusion of candidates on the ballot.
At the same time, each dominant party acts to thwart internal competition, that is, Biden’s or Trump’s rivals in the primaries.
Trump is thus boycotting the televised debates between his rivals for the Republican nomination. The outgoing president, Biden, like his predecessor in 2020, refuses any debate with the other candidates for his party’s nomination. Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips and her other Democratic competitors are even excluded from the ballots in the primaries in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts. With the help of party notables, Biden changed the order of the primaries by delaying that of Iowa and undermining the importance of that of New Hampshire, two states where he had suffered bitter failures in 2020. Biden also authorized the Super Political Action Committees, the most opaque tools of influence of business circles on elections, to finance the primaries, against the advice of Bernie Sanders on the left wing of the party.
The year 2020 marked a paroxysm in practices hindering political competition. Unprecedented in the history of the United States, Trump pushed American democracy to its limits by supporting the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in order to prevent the certification of the election results by Congress.
The year 2024 already marks a new climax. For the first time, a dominant party, the Democratic Party, is seeking to hinder competition within the other major party by banning Trump from ballots used in Republican primaries. And for the first time, the main candidates for the nomination of the dominant parties may never debate on television. Indeed, Biden refuses to commit to having a face-to-face meeting with Trump, and the Republican Party has left the Televised Debates Commission, the private bipartisan entity responsible for organizing the debates.
Curiously, the two men each pose as the best defender of democracy. But neither Biden nor Trump is proposing significant reform that could satisfy citizens’ democratic aspirations.