Washington’s primary helped unpopular Biden and Trump march toward party nominations. Could parties change paths?

WASHINGTON – If it wasn’t clear enough already, Tuesday’s primaries in Washington and three other states made it official: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have enough delegates to clinch their parties’ nominations for president.

Despite both men cruising to victory in Washington’s primary – Trump won nearly 75% of Republican votes and Biden topped 85% among Democrats – a closer look at the results reveals deep dissatisfaction among voters with a rematch of the 2020 race. Recent polling backs that up, with both candidates viewed unfavorably by most voters.

“They’re both damaged,” Cheney resident Bill Lewis said while shopping in Spokane on Thursday, adding that he believes the 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump are too old to effectively serve as president.

“Trump has too many legal problems. He alienates half the population of the country,” said Lewis, 77. “Biden is ignoring a lot of the issues people are concerned about, like the border. I just think they’re out of touch, and the problem is they’re trying to please the controlling parts of their parties.”

By the time Washington voters got a chance to weigh in, a week after the “Super Tuesday” contests in 15 states that all but secured the nominations for Trump and Biden, few alternatives were left in the race. That didn’t stop a sizable slice of the electorate from choosing neither of the leading candidates.

Lynette Bato, a high school teacher who lives in Vancouver, Washington, and was visiting Spokane, said she has voted for Democrats in the past but voted this year for a Republican candidate who had dropped out.

“I feel like they’ve been intimidated by the one who’s up for president, basically bullied out of it,” Bato said of the other GOP candidates.

On the Republican side, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina – who emerged as the main GOP alternative to Trump after serving in his administration – won more than 20% of votes in Washington despite having dropped out of the race a week earlier. Along with votes for other Republicans who had left the race, a quarter of GOP voters opposed Trump.

More than 8% of Democratic primary voters, meanwhile, voted “uncommitted” as part of a campaign to express opposition to Biden’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza after Hamas’ October attack. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who days earlier had ended a campaign intended to give Democrats an alternative to Biden, drew about 3% of votes, while author Marianne Williamson captured a similar sliver of the electorate.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to choose between bad and worse,” said Lewis, who identified himself as a former Republican who would reluctantly vote for Biden because he believes Trump is “a loose cannon” who would hurt the United States. “I don’t know if our country can survive Trump for another four years.”

Meena Bose, director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University, said voters who like neither candidate could play an unusually large role in this year’s race, either by voting for third-party candidates or not voting at all.

“It’s absolutely a concern for both campaigns,” she said. “That said, this is very early in the election season for most voters.”

Bose said the Biden-Trump rematch makes for a nearly unprecedented contest. Not since 1892, when former President Grover Cleveland defeated incumbent President Benjamin Harrison, have voters faced a choice between candidates who had each spent a term in the White House.

Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said both Biden and Trump are likely to run highly negative campaigns aimed at highlighting what voters dislike about each candidate. And because they both have a track record as president, he said, neither candidate will be able to make the kind of hopeful, untested promises that often define campaigns.

“Typically, a presidential campaign is a contrast between either a person with a record and a person with promises – or, every so often, two people with promises,” Engel said. “This time, voters actually know and can evaluate each man’s job as president. That’s really unusual.”

While polls show both candidates are broadly unpopular, Trump may be benefiting from some recency bias among voters who remember being better off before the coronavirus pandemic killed more than 1 million Americans and sent shockwaves through the global economy. Biden has presided over a relatively strong economic recovery compared to similar countries, and inflation has fallen from its peak in 2022, but prices remain higher than before the pandemic.

Despite being indicted on dozens of criminal charges, all of which he denies, Trump leads Biden in some nationwide polls.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released March 2 showed Trump leading Biden 48% to 43% among registered voters.

In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll out Wednesday – the first nationwide poll conducted after Biden’s State of the Union address – voters showed a slight preference for Trump even as their views of the economy grew more positive.

The Biden campaign has launched a messaging blitz aimed at changing voters’ attitudes toward the president’s policies, but polls suggest the president’s main weakness is something he can’t change. A majority of voters who backed Biden in 2020 think he is too old to lead the nation effectively, the New York Times/Siena College poll found, while voters don’t have the same concern about the 77-year-old Trump.

Biden and his staff were incensed when then-special counsel Robert Hur released a report in February that concluded that Biden couldn’t be successfully prosecuted for his handling of classified documents in part because a jury would likely see him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Biden’s performance in the polls has led some prominent left-wing voices, including former Obama administration strategist David Axelrod and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, to suggest the president should step aside and let a more popular Democrat run against Trump.

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a D.C. think tank, said that while she doesn’t expect either candidate to drop out, Trump or Biden could decide to do so up until their party conventions. The Republicans meet in July and the Democrats in August.

“We have the two oldest presidential candidates in American history running for office, so there’s obviously concerns about their health, their ability to continue serving,” she said. “In addition, one of those candidates has unprecedented legal problems and could be convicted of a crime sometime in this election year, so there’s a lot of uncertainties.”

If either Biden or Trump is unable to stand for election or take office for another term, Kamarck said, a complicated set of laws and party rules would determine what happens, depending on the timing of such a change.

If a candidate withdrew before his party’s convention, it could lead to an open process – more or less what happened between 1831 and 1968, Kamarck said – in which delegates from each state would gather and have to decide on a new candidate.

Third-party candidates can play a decisive role in close elections, such as in 2000, when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader likely took enough votes from Democrat Al Gore to help Republican George W. Bush win a famously close race in Florida. Bose said quixotic challenges from the likes of political scion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., activist Cornel West and an as-yet-unnamed candidate on the centrist No Labels ticket could help decide this year’s race.

“Third parties don’t win in American politics, typically,” Bose said. “But they can make a difference, and so this is a concern for both major party candidates.”

While backing third-party candidates can be viable in some smaller contests, Engel said, voters who do so in a presidential race tend to help the candidate they like least. He worries that voters who dislike both Trump and Biden could downplay the differences in how they would govern.

“I think that the idea that these are the same two people, or equally bad choices, is extremely dangerous,” Engel said. “Joe Biden may be a bad president in the minds of voters, but Donald Trump is quite clearly fixing to be the last president.”

Trump has praised authoritarian leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The former president continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him – despite a lack of evidence and rebukes from members of his own administration – and posted on his Truth Social platform in December 2022 that the election outcome justified “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

While shopping at a Spokane mall on Thursday, Bato summed up the feeling among voters this year.

“Nothing’s making us happy,” she said. “It just seems like both are wrong. We don’t have any real change that’s positive with either candidate.”