In 2024, President Joe Biden’s standing inside the Democratic Party will be put to the test for the first time in New Hampshire’s unsanctioned primary on January 23. There is a lack of consensus on how to accurately quantify the outcomes.
Even if Biden were to win the race, he would appear to have lost. Dean Phillips, his opponent, has the potential to lose but still insist on winning.
Insiders in the political sphere will undoubtedly scrutinise the result, and there will be ceaseless attempts to manipulate it.
With the office of president now in place, Biden has lofty expectations. Meanwhile, voters will have to pencil him in since his effort to have South Carolina be the first primary prevented his name from appearing on the ballot. Officials have stated that the victor will not receive any delegates due to the fact that New Hampshire is hosting its Democratic primary ahead of schedule, which goes against the party’s national policy. Last year, the state was deprived of its century-long title as the nation’s first-in-the-nation status.
Although they almost never succeed, primary challenges can sometimes throw incumbent presidents, especially those with questionable electoral prospects, for a loop. Phillips, an underdog, is aiming to repeat Eugene McCarthy’s surprising performance in 1968 against Lyndon B. Johnson.
With everything that has happened, AWN decided to poll over a dozen Democratic strategists and party leaders to find out whether they thought Phillips or Biden would be considered victorious.
Generally speaking, there were four sorts of replies: those who think Biden must win at least 60% to avoid shame, those who think Phillips needs only 30% to 40% to gain momentum (since he isn’t the only non-Biden candidate running), those who think any victory is a victory for Biden, and those who simply don’t know.
Biden “must achieve more than 60%”
The Minnesota congressman needs “around 40 percent” to win, according to Steve Shurtleff, a former state House Speaker and Phillips backer. If the president’s approval rating drops below 60%, he’s in deep trouble, he warned of Biden.
An anonymous Phillips adviser revealed the campaign’s internal thinking and said that 42% was the benchmark for success.
In the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Johnson, Senator McCarthy of Minnesota—a Democrat who was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War and who had the backing of young people—got 42% of the vote. As Phillips hopes to happen with Biden, McCarthy’s victory-in-defeat was essential in Johnson’s withdrawal from the race.
In New Hampshire, an incumbent president with less-than-stellar favorability did not appear on the ballot, while an insurgent challenger received 42% of the vote. According to Phillips’s advisor, the president “saw fit” to drop out of the contest. “So, in my opinion, it’s a significant historical parallel.”
Several Democrats who are endorsing Biden also agree with that standard. Like others for this story, this pro-Biden Democratic strategist has worked on New Hampshire campaigns. They added, “realistically, [Biden] needs to do better than 60 percent.”
Maybe Phillips can get away with a 42nd birthday.
It may be enough for Phillips to receive 30% of the vote “to really surprise people,” according to a second Democratic operative in New Hampshire who is endorsing Biden. Indeed, he is an obscure congressman from a midwestern state against an established incumbent. The ballpark is not the place for him.
Phillips has staked his whole campaign on a great performance in New Hampshire, so the outcome there could determine his fate. His recent two-month bus tours and town halls have taken him all across the state, and he has reportedly spent around $380,000 on broadcast TV commercials there, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Additionally, digital ads supporting Phillips are being sponsored in the state by a super PAC called We Deserve Better, Inc.
The primary schedule makes it unlikely that he would be able to maintain momentum, even if he were to win New Hampshire. Following that, we have South Carolina, which helped drive Biden to the 2020 nomination, and Nevada, a state where Phillips is not running for reelection.
Recent surveys in New Hampshire likewise show that Phillips is well behind the 30% mark, much less 42%. According to a poll conducted in December by Saint Anselm College, Phillips secured 10% of the vote, with self-help author Marianne Williamson coming in second with 7%. Half of the Democrats who expressed interest in writing in Biden fell short of the mark that some are hoping he reaches.
No response was made by the Biden campaign regarding this report.
“He must succeed.”
Not having everyone on board is Biden’s ceiling. In 2012, with no formidable primary challengers, former president Barack Obama earned slightly under 81% of the vote in the state for his reelection campaign; in 1996, former president Bill Clinton received 84% of the vote.
Given the complexity of a write-in campaign, several Biden supporters—and even some of his detractors—said that the president must win.