Will Biden Trip Up in New Hampshire’s Primary the Way LBJ Did?

A Democratic president whose approval rating is below 40 percent is running for reelection. Inflation and foreign-policy crises have many voters soured on his leadership. The president’s iron grip on party insiders and his ability to cow the media convince him that he can ignore primary opponents and leave his name off the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary ballot. His followers there are scrambling to have voters write in his name to avoid the awkward optics of a poor showing against an obscure member of Congress from Minnesota.

You might recognize that these facts apply to Joe Biden, and they do. But they also perfectly describe the situation in which President Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in early 1968.

In the New Hampshire primary that year, Johnson won a narrow, Pyrrhic victory over Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who had built his campaign on an anti–Vietnam War platform. Once the anti-LBJ sentiment among Democrats became visible, it so weakened Johnson that, less than three weeks after the primary, he announced that he would not run again.

“A botched write-in campaign helped nudge Johnson out of a re-election campaign,” recalls David Shribman, a former national political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “It could happen again. It probably won’t, but it could.” At a minimum, a poor Biden showing would put into sharp relief the feeling a majority of Democrats have that Biden is too old and that a second term could end badly.

“Biden has one big challenge,” a former Democratic congressman from Tennessee, Harold Ford, told Fox News Sunday. “A majority of Democrats wish there might be another person running on top of the ticket.”

The fear is that in the privacy of a voting booth, many New Hampshire Democrats could voice their doubts by selecting either Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips or motivational speaker Marianne Williamson. That’s why Democratic leaders are especially nervous that Phillips is challenging Biden and making his age a main issue. “It’s threatening the success of the Democratic ticket from top to bottom,” Representative Annie Kuster (D., N.H.) told Politico.

Phillips is undeterred. He tells reporters, “Joe Biden is going to lose the next election,” and the party must replace him or risk having Donald Trump return to the White House. A wealthy man, he has hired senior strategist Jeff Weaver, an architect of Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, while Steve Schmidt — the manager of John McCain’s comeback in the 2008 New Hampshire primary that won him the GOP nomination — is heading a Phillips super PAC. Phillips has spent about $5 million of his own money (twice what Eugene McCarthy spent in 1968) on pointed anti-Biden TV ads. In one, an actor portrays “Bigfoot” searching for what he calls another “elusive creature” named Joe Biden.

Phillips says Biden is MIA in the Granite State: “He’s not turning up on a debate stage. He’s not campaigning. I’m not seeing him answer a question from the press in a long time. Everything’s prepared remarks. And he’s not even on the ballot. So where’s Joe?”

Publicly, leaders of the Biden write-in effort in New Hampshire insist that Phillips will go nowhere in the state. They point to a new CNN poll that shows that 63 percent of New Hampshire’s Democratic voters plan to write in Biden. Phillips has 10 percent support in the poll; Williamson has 9 percent support. Another 11 percent say they will support another minor candidate. But the poll reveals storm clouds for Biden. Just 46 percent of likely primary voters say that Biden would give the party its best chance of winning in 2024, while 39 percent say someone else would do better against the GOP. His approval rating among Democratic-primary voters is only 60 percent.

Privately, Democrats say they know that the history of 1968 is a cautionary guide. In polls before the primary that year, Eugene McCarthy was polling between 10 and 20 percent. But he began to build momentum and had a last-minute surge. Johnson wound up winning by only 49 percent to McCarthy’s 42 percent. When you count GOP write-in votes cast for McCarthy, LBJ led by just 230 votes statewide. McCarthy’s team realized that a loser who won many more votes than expected would be viewed as the winner. Major media outlets turned on a dime and repeated that analysis so often that many people thought LBJ had lost.

If Biden performs similarly by scoring well below expectations in New Hampshire, it will release pent-up concerns about his electability. Political analyst John Ellis reports that Democratic candidates for state and federal offices “have been telling anyone who would listen that running on a ticket with Biden atop it diminishes their chances of winning in November.” By nominating Biden, Democrats are putting not just the White House at risk but also their control of the Senate and the House.

But Biden struggled for 35 years to become president, and Jill Biden is in no hurry to leave her role as first lady. The Economist concludes that Biden “has been seduced into believing that his country needs him because he is a proven Trump-beater,” even though polls now show him trailing Trump in every swing state.

Moreover, those with whom Biden has surrounded himself make it unlikely that he will learn from LBJ’s experience. The Economist notes: “His staff’s desire to serve has surely been tainted by ambition. It is in the nature of administrations that many of a president’s closest advisers will never again be so close to power. Of course they do not want to see their man surrender the White House in order to focus on his presidential library.”

Should Biden’s showing in New Hampshire make the public’s dissatisfaction with him obvious, Democrats could be in a world of hurt: stuck with a wounded nominee rejected by much of his own party, whose physical and mental frailties make it hard for him to go on the road and assuage the doubts about his ability to serve a second term. The worst nightmare of progressives — a second Trump stint in the White House — could then become reality.

And if it does, Democrats and their allies in the media–industrial complex will have only themselves to blame.