The new duel between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November is almost certain: both incumbent Biden and his predecessor Trump have secured the necessary delegate votes for their nomination in the current primaries of their parties. The Democrat and his Republican rival won the respective primaries in the states of Georgia, Mississippi and Washington on Tuesday, according to US television networks.
Trump thus exceeded the number of 1,215 party conference delegates required to become the presidential candidate. Biden, in turn, received over the number of 1,968 delegates needed by the Democrats. This means that the election on November 5th will be a repeat of the 2020 ballot, in which Biden defeated the then incumbent Trump.
Trump claimed in his victory messages that the Republican Party was united behind him. He called Biden “the worst president in the history of our country.” The USA is in a “serious decline,” the right-wing populist announced in a video published on the X platform.
Biden, for his part, thanked the primary participants in a statement for trusting him to “lead our party – and our country – again.” He warned that Trump posed a greater “danger” than ever before. The president accused his rival of waging a campaign of “grudge, revenge and retaliation.”
The surveys show that most voters are by no means keen on another duel between 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump. The majority considers both opponents to be too old for another term in office.
Nevertheless, Biden's candidacy was virtually certain from the start of the primaries because he had no serious rival within the party. Trump, in turn, has effectively been the Republican presidential candidate since the exit of his last intra-party rival, former governor and ex-ambassador Nikki Haley, after the mega election day “Super Tuesday” last week.
The right-wing populist, who remained very popular among the party base despite his massive judicial problems, had clearly dominated the Republican primaries since they began in January. His competitors – including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – gave up one by one.
The Republicans will formally choose their presidential candidate in July at a party conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Democrats will do so in August at a meeting in Chicago, Illinois. The primaries for both parties will run until the beginning of June, but they are now just a formality.
It is rather unusual that the presidential candidates of the two major parties are de facto determined so early in the election year. Biden and Trump have around eight months to focus entirely on their duel. Biden had already launched the election campaign against Trump with full force on Friday in his State of the Union address to Congress – in which he described his rival as a threat to “freedom and democracy”.
Trump's legal entanglements will also play an important role in the duel for the White House. The ex-president is facing four criminal charges relating, among other things, to his role in the storming of the congressional seat by fanatical Trump supporters in January 2021 and his other attempts to retroactively overturn his 2020 election defeat against Biden.
According to the current schedule, the first of the criminal trials against the ex-president is scheduled to begin in New York in just under two weeks. It concerns the accusation of falsifying financial figures in connection with a hush money payment to the former porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election campaign.
However, Trump's lawyers asked this week to postpone the trial. They referred to the Supreme Court's pending decision on whether their client, as a former president, enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing on the issue for April 25, and its decision is expected in June.
In the legal disputes, Trump and his lawyers are hoping to either prevent the criminal trials or at least delay them until after the election. In this respect, it was already a success for the ex-president that the Supreme Court decided, at the request of his lawyers, to deal with the question of immunity.
