The configuration of the next American presidential election seems to have been sealed Tuesday evening by Georgia, Mississippi, the state of Washington and Hawaii, whose primaries and caucuses confirmed, unsurprisingly, the crowning of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as candidates of their respective party, with a view to the election next November.
Barring a surprise, which is less and less likely, the 2024 presidential election is therefore preparing to expose American voters to a second version of the face-to-face which took place between the Democrat and the populist with authoritarian overtones in 2020. A perspective that displeases more than half of Americans, according to a survey carried out last December.
This is the first campaign featuring two presidents – one in office and another ousted – since 1912, but also the first rematch between two presidential candidates since 1956. A rare phenomenon, therefore, on the American political scene some elements of the past may resonate with the present, without however marking the trajectory of this atypical election over the next eight months.
In 1956, incumbent Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower once again found himself facing Adlai Stevenson, whom he had defeated four years earlier, in 1952, with more than 55% of the vote. The Democrat was then left in the dust by winning only 9 states.
However, as in 2024, this second round was also colored by concerns expressed by the president’s opponents about his physical capacity to serve a second term.
“An aging president”
At 67 years old – 3 months more than the life expectancy at the time – Dwight D. Eisenhower was considered too old to return, especially since he had suffered a heart attack in 1955. having kept him away from the Oval Office for 7 months of hospitalization, then forced him to a minimum and distant service for several months of convalescence.
As predicted by political columnist James Reston in the pages of New York Times in 1955, the Democrats were quick to exploit this flaw by qualifying Eisenhower as a “part-time president”, but also by raising doubts about the ability of his vice-president, the young Richard Nixon, to do so. replace in case of problem.
During the campaign, Adlai Stevenson assured that the future of the Republican Party “no longer belonged to an aging president who would not be able to succeed himself if elected, but to his young and ambitious heir, Mr. Nixon », whose inexperience had to be taken into account by the Americans when making their choice.
A communication line operated by the candidate for the Republican nomination — now out of the race — Nikki Haley, who last June warned voters, on the X network, that “a vote for President Biden was in fact a vote for vice president [Kamala] Harris”, while mocking during his political rallies, a political apparatus in Washington resembling more “a residence for the elderly” than a dynamic place of power capable of breathing new life into the country.
On November 4, 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower was re-elected as president of the United States with 2 percentage points more than during his victory in 1952, stealing two states from the Democrats in the process. In the last year of his first term, he still received between 68 and 79% support from American voters, a level of approval far from the 38% enjoyed by outgoing President Joe Biden since the start of the year.
His campaign was also timid, marked by another hospitalization in June, due to intestinal inflammation. He died in 1969, at the age of 78, four years after the death of Adlai Stevenson, who only lived to be 65 years old.
Another year, another story: in 1912, two American presidents found themselves on the same ballot for the first time, in a unique configuration which opposed the progressive Theodore Roosevelt, 26e President of the United States, to Republican William Howard Taft, outgoing president, who succeeded him in 1909.
A past into which the independent candidate in the 2024 presidential race, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, must certainly delve from time to time to keep his hopes of victory alive: that year, taking advantage of the division of the vote, it was the Democrat Woodrow Wilson who got his hands on the keys to the White House, with nearly 42% of the votes cast in his favor.