With Haley’s departure, the rematch between Biden and Trump is now set

The exit by Nikki Haley from the Republican primary after a string of resounding losses on Super Tuesday assured former President Donald Trump of his party’s nomination, kicking off a general election contest with President Joe Biden that both sides expect will be bitter, brutal and long.

The matchup that many Americans had hoped to avoid — the 2024 sequel of Biden vs. Trump — is now an inescapable reality.

It will be the country’s first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years, a consequential yet familiar collision of starkly different visions of American power, policy and democratic governance. And it will be an eight-month slog, with two nominees who polls show are deeply unpopular and who are each determined to make the race about his opponent, leaving both bent on running exceedingly negative campaigns.

“I’m not the gift of all presidents,” Biden told donors at a fundraiser last month, “but I’m sure in hell better than the last guy.”

Biden has cast Trump as a threat to the very foundations of American democracy. He has cautiously avoided discussing the many legal threats facing the former president, including four criminal indictments and one trial set to begin later this month.

Trump, 77, has portrayed Biden, 81, as elderly, enfeebled and unable to perform the basic tasks of the presidency. “It’s the fascists and the communists that surround him — they’re making the calls,” Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday, in a sign of the caustic and conspiracy-tinged campaign to come. “They’re calling the shots. He’s not calling the shots.”

Much has changed since Biden defeated Trump four years ago.

America withdrew from Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, the COVID pandemic receded and the stock market soared. Inflation and interest rates spiked — but unemployment did not. The federal right to an abortion was swept away by the Supreme Court, border crossings surged to record highs and a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during a riot that resulted in federal criminal charges against more than 1,200 people — including Trump, who is accused of being part of a conspiracy to defraud the nation by subverting the 2020 election result.

The 2024 election is expected to be a referendum on all of that, and more.

Trump has not yet formally secured the delegates needed for the nomination — that could come as early as next week — but much of the party raced to coalesce behind him Wednesday, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who has long loathed Trump. On Thursday, Biden will have a chance to make his case for a second term during his State of the Union speech.

Biden, who ran in 2020 to restore “the soul of the nation” by wresting the White House from Trump, has made freedom a central theme of his candidacy, highlighting abortion rights for women and the need for free elections for everyone. Trump has made immigration an animating cause of his campaign, promising to seal the border immediately if he returns to the White House, even if it requires being a “dictator,” as he put it, on Day 1.

The economy is also expected to play a critical role. Americans remain downbeat even if the economic mood has ticked upward. Biden’s own approval ratings have yet to benefit after rampant inflation in 2022 drove prices upward.

Democrats are roiled by divisions over the Israel-Hamas war and the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, with more than 100,000 primary voters in Michigan voting for “uncommitted” in that swing state’s recent primary to protest Biden. The Biden campaign has acknowledged that the president begins with soft support among some key traditional Democratic constituencies, including younger people as well as Black and Hispanic voters.

Trump must try to reunite his party after a primary in which Haley continued to win a sizable share of votes even after her eventual defeat had appeared almost inevitable. She ran the strongest in some of the suburban communities that have historically swung elections.

She did not immediately endorse him, putting the burden to win her supporters on him. “This is now his time for choosing,” Haley said Wednesday.

Trump must also balance campaigning and court dates. His first trial, over allegations that he made hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 race, is slated to begin jury selection in less than three weeks. Trump is facing 34 felony charges and a potential maximum sentence of four years in prison. He could be convicted before Election Day, a simultaneous campaign for the White House and criminal sentencing that would have no precedent.

Entering the general election, Biden trails in most public polling. His advisers prefer a different indicator: Democrats have outpaced Biden’s low approval ratings to repeatedly win down-ballot races in 2022, 2023 and a variety of special elections.

One looming issue for Biden that he can do little to address is his age. Voters across the spectrum express concern about America’s oldest president, who would be 86 at the end of a second term.

The Biden campaign has taken advantage of his incumbency to build up a financial and early organizational edge over Trump. That is an inversion of four years ago, when a relatively broke Biden began $187 million behind Trump’s operation.

Biden quickly caught up back then. Trump’s team does not expect to match the Democrats dollar for dollar this time, but his super political action committee has been wooing big donors and Trump recently met in a group with one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk. Trump allies are expected to be installed atop the Republican National Committee on Friday, and the former president has already begun fundraising into the party apparatus, which can take in far larger checks than his campaign alone.

For Trump, the 2024 election will be his third in a row atop the Republican ticket. His standing as the party standard-bearer — both politically and on policy — is now undisputed, having transformed the party’s positions on free trade, spending, entitlement programs and international affairs.

Trump has also been reshaping the political coalition that makes up the Republican Party. The GOP has steadily lost ground with women and college-educated voters in the Trump era, while making fresh inroads with nonwhite voters, especially those who did not graduate from college.

In 2020, Biden carried Black and Latino voters who did not graduate from college by landslide margins, according to exit polling. But he leads that group now only narrowly, 47% to 41%, in the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll.

This year, Trump marched to the GOP nomination with relative ease, winning each of the first four states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — by mostly commanding margins. The former president had appeared weakened after the 2022 midterm elections, when a number of his acolytes lost critical races, but he announced his own candidacy only a week later. His indictments in 2023, beginning in New York, did not weaken him but instead appeared to bind his voters more firmly to him.

Trump has broadly lumped all of his mounting legal woes — which diverted more than $50 million from his political accounts to legal fees last year — as “election interference.” He faces two federal indictments by special counsel Jack Smith over his handling of classified documents in Florida and his efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election. He was also indicted in Georgia for what prosecutors called a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the election result in the state.

It is not clear how many trials he will face before November, but the one in the hush-money case begins March 25 — within weeks of when he is expected to formally secure the delegates needed for the nomination.

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