No prediction for next year’s race is too weird to come true

In March 1968 President Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he would not run for re-election — less than eight months before the voting began. 

As you read this column, we are 52 weeks from the 2024 presidential election.

Today the incumbent and the leading GOP candidate show no signs of repeating LBJ’s decision to quit the race.

But there are daily tremors of anxiety about the leading presidential  candidates being forced to bow out.

On the Republican side, some people hope, and others fear that Trump falls out of the race because of all the federal and state charges against him. His trial on charges of trying to illegally overturn the 2020 election is set to start in March.

On the Democratic side, Biden’s lackluster poll numbers fuel talk about him being pushed to exit the election stage.

Last week Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips officially entered the Democratic primary by hammering on Biden’s age as the reason his polls aren’t better.

“I am younger,” Phillips said plainly in an interview with NBC News. The 54-year-old millionaire is basing his candidacy on the need for a “new generation” of political leaders.

Leading Democrats dismiss Phillips, who lacks name recognition and money, as a challenger.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former Speaker, is also not buying Phillips’ attack on Biden’s age. “[Biden’s] younger than I am,” the 83-year-old told a group of reporters, including myself, last week at a Third Way event. She said the 80-year-old Biden “is our nominee…” and that, based on his record, knowledge and experience that comes with age, “he will be president.”

There is also speculation that Biden will push Vice President Kamala Harris off his ticket because she lacks strong poll numbers. Every incumbent president running for re-election in my lifetime hears calls to switch running mates to bolster their chances for re-election.

There was talk that President Obama should replace Vice President Biden with Hillary Clinton to shore up his base against Mitt Romney in 2012. And there was talk that Trump should replace Vice President Mike Pence with Nikki Haley before his losing 2020 race against Biden.

The first female vice president was recently told by Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes that there is chatter among top Democratic donors that they would “not naturally fall into line,” if Biden left the race and Harris became the party’s nominee.

Harris responded: “Well, first of all, I’m not going to engage in that hypothetical because Joe Biden is very much alive and running for reelection.”

“Our democracy is on the line, Bill,” she went on. “And I frankly, in my head, do not have time for parlor games when we have a president who is running for reelection. That’s it.”

On the Republican side, speculation about Trump’s potential for quitting the race centers on whether he is too damaged by four indictments and 91 felony charges.

But for now, Trump remains the strong favorite of GOP primary voter, 27 percentage points ahead of everyone else in Iowa.  

The early favorite to challenge Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has faded to a distant second place and is now tied with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in Iowa in the race to become GOP voters’ alternative to Trump.

Haley began her campaign in February by saying all candidates over 70-years-old should be required to take a mental competency test. That would hit Biden as well as the 77-year-old Trump.

Haley’s problem is that if she pushes the Trump out of the race, she risks losing much of his fervent, older populist base, mostly white and male. She is a charismatic woman of color with support based among moderate Republicans.

Biden remains the overwhelming choice among Democrats for the presidential nomination, but the latest Gallup poll has his job approval with Democrats down 11 percentage points, to 75 percent.

“Biden’s immediate and decisive show of support for Israel following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas appears to have turned off some in his own party, resulting in Democrats’ worst assessment of the president since he took office,” Gallup reported.

Handicapping the Democrats most likely to replace Biden as the party’s presidential nominee requires setting the odds on six contenders:  California Governor Gavin Newsom; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker; Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar; New Jersey Senator Cory Booker; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. 

Newsom’s high-profile support for new gun control laws, and his surprise appearance during the summer on a conservative Fox News show, have led one California political columnist to say he is running in a “shadow primary.”

All these fantasy football predictions of an approaching rollercoaster ride for American politics next year take on a new level of seriousness because of Trump. He has transformed the GOP into an extremist authoritarian cult of personality, willing to undermine election results and delighting in chaos in government.

With so much on the line, both parties are anxiously preparing for plot twists in presidential politics, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation.

Before Trump came on the scene, so many of the possibilities for next year’s politics seemed far-fetched. But strange things happened in 1968. We may again be entering the zone of “strange things happening.”

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.