America is staring in disbelief and denial at a repeat of Trump and Biden
President Biden is heading for the Democratic nomination. Former President Donald J. Trump could finalize his party's nod within days.
The American answer: This can't be true.
Even as both men head towards likely summer coronations and a rematch in the fall, an undercurrent of disbelief flows through the country. Many Republicans view Biden as so politically and physically weak that they believe his party will replace him. Many Democrats cannot imagine that Trump could win another nomination while facing 91 felonies and four criminal cases.
This disbelief – ranging from casual doubt to conspiratorial denial – has lurked beneath a year of polling showing a deeply bleak public mood, and has emerged in dozens of interviews over the past two weeks, as well as in recent statements from candidates and political commentators .
“They're going to pull a switcheroo 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, N.H., an independent who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 and Democrats in previous presidential elections, also wondered whether Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee.
“The jury is out,” she said. “We don't know what will happen to Trump legally.”
Such conflicting views reflect how doubts about Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have different origins in each party.
For Republicans, declining confidence in the political system is the dominant theme. The party is nearly a decade into the Trump era, and disinformation and conspiratorial thinking about Biden's health and Democratic plans to replace him are rampant in the conservative news media and the broader political world. A favorite and completely baseless theory is that Michelle Obama will win his place in a Democratic coup.
Democrats, in turn, are consumed with the heartbreaking hope that Trump will not be the nominee. They are crossing their fingers that his lawsuits or attempts to disqualify him from office via the 14th Amendment will keep him off the ballot. Most have little hope that his appointment could be derailed; they simply cling to the belief that a man they despise will somehow disappear.
In the muddy middle are also more casual voters who are not yet paying attention to the election almost a year away, but who believe the nation will surely find someone new.
“People in both parties really dislike the other's likely candidate,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. He said he had heard enough people suggest that Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden would be displaced that he has included a question about it in the polls he is conducting this month.
“Voters who are thinking, 'Dear God, let's not repeat 2020,' are going to realize we're heading for another episode,” Franklin said. “Same characters, same storyline. Get used to it.”
The Biden campaign's internal data has shown that nearly three-quarters of the so-called targeted voter universe does not believe Trump will be the Republican nominee. Those voters are a broad group 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 are facing a barrage of wild speculation from Republicans.
“Personally, I don't think he'll make it,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Biden on Fox News last month. Mr. DeSantis proposed a Fox News town hall event last week that Democrats “could replace him with someone else.”
The commentator Megyn Kelly put forward the theory about Mrs. Obama on her podcast last week, and right-wing host Tomi Lahren said on her Internet show Wednesday that Democrats would replace Governor 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 2024 nominee for president,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump. Posted on social media a week before the Iowa caucuses.
Although Mrs. Obama has repeatedly ruled out any presidential interest, OddsChecker, an online bookmaker, said Friday gave her almost equal opportunities of winning the presidential election with Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who came third in Iowa on Monday. Both backed Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. The site ranked Mr. Newsom fifth, well ahead of Mr. DeSantis.
Many of these beliefs stem from the Trump-inspired right, which has spread all kinds of false claims about the 2020 election and is willing to believe that the solution will be back in 2024. The overarching, bizarre idea is that the Democratic Party is acting at the whims of the “deep state” and has already devised a plan to replace Mr. Biden.
And there are conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories.
Several Republicans interviewed during recent presidential campaign stops repeated a decade-old anti-transgender falsehood about Mrs. Obama promoted by disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“I think Michelle Obama — or Michael Obama — will be it for the Democrats,” said Sue Grove, a secretary from Van Meter, Iowa, who works for Republican lawmakers at the Iowa State Capitol and supported entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy for president before he dropped out. “I've also heard rumors about Oprah. I don't know how Biden could get back in.”
Far-right online circles are also full of baseless theories that Democrats could cause the 81-year-old president's untimely death. Ms. Grove hinted darkly at that idea: “You know, there are a lot of suspicious deaths and sudden deaths in the Democratic Republic,” she said. “There are a lot of suicides, right?”
Other suspicions are not nearly as violent.
Some Republicans predict that Mr. Biden will be impeached at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. They note that leading Democrats quickly rallied behind Biden in 2020 to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — and emphasize that it wouldn't be so far-fetched if the party were to turn against its politically vulnerable president now.
“I don't think Biden will last,” said Amy Meyer, a Republican data analyst who served as an Iowa caucus captain for Mr. DeSantis. “The Democrats have their super delegates and so they don't have a democratic primary process. So I guess they'll just do what they want.
No prominent Democrats have argued that Trump will not be the Republican nominee. Part of Mr. Biden's immediate problem, his advisers say, is that voters who dislike Mr. Trump have not realized how likely he is to win the nomination.
The left, alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump presidency, is looking to the justice system for salvation, hoping prosecutors will put an end to his political juggernaut. Or, if not a criminal jury, then perhaps the Supreme Court, which Democrats hope will uphold two states' decisions to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
“It seems like there is a massive delusion about Trump,” said Bill Schafer, a renewable energy executive from Boulder, Colorado, who described himself as a former Republican who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. He said he couldn't have done that. accept that Republicans would nominate Mr. 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.”
In fact, convincing voters that Trump will participate in the vote in November is central to Biden's election strategy. Campaign officials say his political standing will improve once the reality of Trump's likely renomination becomes clear and voters are not closely following the race.
“This is not hypothetical,” said Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa. “The President looks forward to spending the next ten 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 a different matchup for 2024.
Yoram Ariely, a wealthy Democrat who has stopped importing and exporting fruit juice concentrates, took it upon himself to order an opinion poll in October from SurveyUSA asking voters if they would prefer Mr. Biden end his presidential campaign and run for vice president.
Using that biased and unlikely question, the poll found that 69 percent of 1,024 Democrats believed Biden would be better off trying to win back the office he held for eight years while Barack Obama was president.
Mr. Ariely said he subsidized the poll to convince Mr. Biden and other Democrats that the president should do something other than seek reelection. So far, that proposal has not received much attention.
“If he were to resign clearly and gracefully, that would be best,” said Mr. Ariely, who splits his time between New York state and Florida. “My suggestion is that he do the right thing and find an exit.”
Shane Goldmacher, Neil Viddor And Alyce McFadden reporting contributed.