You would hardly know from the 2024 cycle that primaries are supposed to be political contests. Each party’s primaries, if they can be called that, were long exercises in foregone conclusions. And so the primary process, which for nearly 60 years has been a popular contest in which each party’s internal factions jockeyed for position, worked to shape the party identity, and ultimately made their case to voters did not come to pass this year. Functionally, there were two incumbents. And functionally, neither party’s primary offered a meaningful opportunity for the expression of internal dissent.
This did not change on Super Tuesday. Biden and Trump racked up delegates; the votes that were cast in the presidential contest were cast mostly in full awareness of their futility, the result already decided. There is one option labeled “R”, and one option labeled “D”. More than once throughout the campaign, I’ve imagined America’s political party leaders as cruel lunch ladies, slopping greyish gruel on to trays for an unappetized America. “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.”
Except nobody does like it. Poll after poll showed that voters did not want a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In a healthier political system, this discontent with the two incumbents would be an opportunity for other ideas to emerge, for other candidates to make a case to the public. In ours, this dissatisfaction did nothing to affect the slow march to the inevitable. In leaks to the press, representatives from both campaigns have long been speaking of a pivot to the general, and of waiting for voters to let it sink in that the general election would in fact be between Trump and Biden. Like doctors giving a patient a bad prognosis, they seemed eager to skip over the formality of having to deal with how little they had satisfied their constituents, ready to get back to the part where they accrued more power for themselves.
But the fact that both parties are sclerotic, slow-moving, captured by cynical necessity and immune from dissent should not suggest that there is any symmetry between them. Functionally, ours is now a unipolar national politics: Trump is the sole author of its controversies and the sole definer of its terms. The Republican party has remade itself in his image, and the Democratic party has struggled to represent all of those who reject him. Neither party was especially strong before Trump’s emergence, and perhaps in another world, the primary system would have collapsed this way even in his absence. But in this world, the force of Trump is what broke the primaries, making every contest, on each side, little more than a referendum on him.
On the Republican side, the farcical and juvenile little primary contest, which was never a real competition anyway, dwindled steadily and inevitably down to just two candidates: Donald Trump and the person whose futile candidacy was meant to stand in for all the aspirations of a non-Trump alternative, Nikki Haley. Once the other alternatives were gone, Haley garnered perhaps more support than was expected –showing that a small but sizable contingent of Republican voters are dissatisfied with Trump. But on Tuesday, she lost consistently by wide margins; her unhappy minority was always a small minority; there was not one day when the Republican primary was a real contest. It seems almost ridiculous now, remembering how at the beginning of 2023, some people thought that Ron DeSantis might actually have a chance. The ensuing months proved what we now know: there will never be another meaningfully competitive Republican primary for as long as Trump is alive. So long as he cares to run, it will always be his.
The whole Republican party is his. It’s not just that Trump has no real Republican challengers for the presidency: it is that he seems to wield more or less sole authority over policy for all Republican federal elected officials. It was a nod from Trump that killed the draconian border and immigration bill that Democrats had assented to earlier this year – not because Trump did not like the policies, which were a litany of violent Republican priorities, but because he wanted to be able to continue to use immigration as a cudgel in an election year. And so the Republican party dropped one of its most longstanding goals – increasing cruelty to migrants – for the sake of Donald Trump’s personal political convenience. The Democrats, of course, took this as a win: they wanted to be able to say to the American people that they tried to hand all power and policy over to the Republicans, but that the Republicans are too incompetent and internally corrupt to let them.
This incident, and the Democrats’ response to it, serves as a decent metaphor for the status of the party: a frantic and committed compliance. Since Donald Trump’s rise, and particularly since the cruelty, disfunction and anti-democratic potential of his tenure became clear during his first term, the Democratic party has become the receptacle for all the hopes of a resurgent left, from the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter. It was these voters, and their anger at Trump, that allowed Democrats to retake the House in 2018; it was these voters, and their anger at Dobbs, that allowed the party an unprecedented victory in the 2022 midterms. But the party has responded to these newly energized liberal voters with all the enthusiasm of someone finding something writhing and slimy under a rock. The party would rather chase centrist and conservative voters who are permanently in thrall to Trump than service this base. They remain a center-right party, contrasting themselves to a far-right opposition. This, they say, is the only way they can win.
And this is more or less the only option that their voters have. For all the rancor of the 2020 Democratic primary, that contest was never very competitive, either: Joe Biden was always the presumed frontrunner, and he solidified the nomination when he handily won South Carolina, a victory that showed support from Black voters, particularly older ones.
But in 2024, that support seems to be dwindling. In part, it is dwindling because Biden has been so condescending and hostile to the resurgent left. He has repeatedly voiced his distaste for abortion, the issue that his campaign will hinge on; his administration has severely bungled its response to Arab American and pro-Palestinian voters who are angry at Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Ordinarily, this would be a moment for a leftwing challenger to emerge, to raise the salience of progressive issues and exert influence over the party, even if such a challenge could not capture the ticket. But the necessity of defeating Donald Trump has made such a contest seem unacceptably risky: aside from Dean Phillips, a centrist footnote of a presidential candidate, Biden has had no primary challenge. Concerns about his candidacy have taken on a pretext of being about his age, his energy. But what is really at stake is the fragility of the anti-Trump coalition. Real political struggle, both within the Democratic party and in the nation as a whole, has been largely suspended for the sake of defeating Donald Trump and his threat to constitutional democracy. But Donald Trump keeps on not being defeated.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
