The 2024 Presidential Election: The Stakes Could Not Be Greater

The presidential primaries and caucuses that are beginning this month in Iowa and New Hampshire mark the start of the selection of delegates to the Republican and Democratic Parties’ National Conventions. In each convention that candidate who receives the majority of votes from the delegates will be that Party’s nominee for president. It is expected that the incumbent President Joseph Biden will win the Democratic nomination, easily beating some minor candidates. The pre-primary election polls among Republicans have former president Donald Trump with a commanding lead over his main opponents, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

But it’s the actual votes that will matter and we will know more as the primaries and caucuses occur. The unexpected could still possibly happen for the Republicans, leading to a nominee other than Trump. And if Trump is not the nominee, will Biden possibly surprise everyone and step aside, since he has said that one reason he is running for reelection is that he is the Democratic candidate best able to defeat Trump? And to win in what is likely to be another extraordinarily close election like in 2016, in which Trump won the Electoral College vote by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states, and in 2020 when Biden achieved an electoral vote majority by fewer than 50,000 votes also in three states.

But looming over this entire process and these speculations are greater concerns: the stakes in the 2024 election could not be greater for the United States and possibly the world. What is at stake is not only the direction of government policies in the U.S. but also the state of American democracy itself. National policies can change strikingly because of partisan polarization and the increasing competitiveness of the Democratic and Republican parties since the mid-1970s – which a longer story than can be described here. With this polarization and competitiveness, unified party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress (and thereby control over federal judicial appointments) has occurred more frequently over the last 30 years than in the past. With this has come major changes in national policies such as health care reform under President Barack Obama, major tax cuts under Trump, and major spending programs by the Biden administration. Trump was also able to make new appointments to the Supreme Court, leading to a supermajority of conservative Supreme Court justices. He had the help of Republican control of the Senate to end the practice of the “filibuster” for Supreme Court appointments, which ended the power of the minority party in the Senate to block such appointments. (The Democrats had ended this for other government appointment when they controlled the Senate under Obama.) …