The Biden-Trump repeat: a nation longing for change gets more of the same

The promise of change has been a powerful force in presidential campaigns for decades, a reliable appeal to a fundamental desire among the American electorate. It was central to the candidacies of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump.

‘Change vs. more of the same” read a hand-scrawled sign placed on a wall in Bill Clinton’s war room when he won the White House in 1992.

Yet this year, Americans, hungry for a new direction in almost every respect, are faced with the choice between continuation or recovery.

The battle between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is the rare election without a major party candidate who can be presented as a fresh face and a new future. Neither man is ready to tap into all the enthusiasm and excitement that comes with unknown possibilities. Instead, Americans are getting a replay, a race between a president and a former president, both older than 90 percent of Americans — Mr. Biden is 81 and Mr. Trump is 77 — and viewed unfavorably by a majority of them.

Whoever can best navigate a match that is in many ways out of sync with the moment could prove to have the upper hand over the next eight months.

“There are only two choices: stay the course or time for change,” said Paul Begala, a senior strategist for Clinton’s presidential campaigns, describing the dominant dynamic in American politics. “We want change,” Mr Begala said of the nation. “We are revolutionary. We are built for change.”

This dynamic is likely to be particularly challenging for Mr. Biden, despite the fact that the former president is one of the best-known figures in American political history. Incumbent presidents are almost always forced to rely on their record, a limitation Mr. Biden has accepted by promising to “finish the job” in a second term. But he has also tried to shift the focus. In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Mr. Biden spoke almost as much about Mr. Trump’s agenda as he did about his own.

Promising a new chapter has been a recurring and often overriding theme in American campaigns at least since the young Mr. Kennedy was elected to the White House in 1960. Jimmy Carter won the election in the post-Watergate era by presenting himself as “A leader, for a changein 1976. Four years later, Mr. Reagan ousted Mr. Carter amid a stagnant economy with the promise of “Let’s make America great again.”

Mr. Obama’s entire campaign — T-shirts, posters, hats and signature speeches — was built around the theme “Change we can believe in.” Mr. Trump took Mr. Reagan’s slogan and turned it into his own.

But this election is in many ways an anomaly. The last time a president and a former president were on the same ballot was in 1912, and the last rematch in a presidential race was in 1956.

At the same time, there have rarely been presidential elections with such an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – both with the country and with the main party candidates seeking to lead it.

It has been twenty years since the invasion of Iraq that more Americans thought the country was going in the right direction than in the wrong direction. The latest NBC News poll found that 73 percent of voters thought the country was on the wrong track — and that dissatisfaction with the country’s direction has almost consistently exceeded 70 percent over the past three years. Never before in the history of polling have so many voters been so unhappy for so long.

More than four times as many voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they were angry, scared, disappointed, resigned, worried or disappointed about this election than said they were happy, excited or hopeful about it.

That so many Americans want the country to move in a different direction has raised concerns among many Democrats as they watch Mr. Biden in these early days of his reelection campaign.

“In this 20-year environment of discontent, change is a powerful force,” said Douglas Sosnik, a former senior adviser to Clinton. “If the choice is: would you rather stay the course or change, then I would always choose change in the world we find ourselves in.”

Pete Giangreco, Mr. Obama’s campaign adviser, agreed, noting that the American mood has become even gloomier since the coronavirus pandemic. Appealing to restive Americans should be central to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump’s planning for the coming campaigns, he said.

“If 30 percent or less think the country is going in the right direction, you better be the change agent,” he said. “You better compare who will be the better change, otherwise you won’t get anywhere near 50 percent.”

Mr. Trump will have his own challenges as he presents himself as a candidate for change. It’s been less than four years since he served, and he’s dominated American politics ever since. That could pose a challenge for Trump supporters trying to present him as a candidate for change.

“We need to get back to that future — 2017 to 2020,” Sen. Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News this week. “We want those four years again.”

Yet Mr. Trump has presented himself as an outsider throughout his years in national politics; his election to the White House in 2016, along with Obama’s campaign, is one of the best examples in modern history of a candidate for change. His advisers and allies have made it clear that he will again try to claim the mantle of change.

“He’s not an incumbent,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican consultant who served as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. “He is a rebel.”

Biden’s campaign is undermining that claim, warning that the former president is not the face of change, but of chaos.

“I think Trump is a candidate for change,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, said in an interview. “But a majority of people think it is a deterioration.”

Ms. Conway argued that Americans have become more comfortable with Mr. Trump as they have gotten to know him better, and that they were not afraid of the kind of change that would come with a second Trump term.

“It’s change without that full X-factor,” she said. “Americans love the concept and idea of ​​change and choice, of revolutions and options – and yet they take their minivan to Chick-fil-A three times a week.”

In the latest Times/Siena poll, 47 percent of respondents said they strongly disapproved of how Mr. Biden was handling his job. The president’s approval rating in the latest NBC poll is at 37 percent, by far the lowest for a sitting president in four decades of polling. But the same poll suggested voters would base their decision on both the challenger and the incumbent. That’s potentially good news for the Biden camp, which has signaled its intention to turn the election into a referendum on Mr. Trump.

There is precedent for what Mr. Biden hopes to do. In 2012, as Obama sought a second term, his campaign reviewed polls showing that voters were unhappy with the state of the economy and responded with economic policy proposals designed to ease middle-class anxiety. The new message helped shift the focus of the race to Mitt Romney, his rival, by portraying him as elite, wealthy and out of touch with the concerns of working Americans.

“If we had run that campaign as a referendum on the presidency,” Mr. Giangreco said, “we would have lost it.”