The phrase “Houston, we have a problem” was said by one of the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970 when the trip couldn’t land on the moon due to problems on the ship. In politics, it is used to say that there are difficulties in achieving objectives.
17 months and days from the presidential election In the United States, in November 2024, the scenarios are complex enough to expect conflicting results: the president Joseph Biden is emerging as the candidate who leads the Democratic preferences, but with 82 years on his back and mental lucidity problems that are already part of the campaigns, while his vice president Kamala Harris he could never emerge as a viable personality.
On the contrary, and surprisingly, Former President Donald Trump leads all Republican polls with an advantage up to 3 to 1 over his closest competitor, the far-right governor of Florida Ronald DeSantis.
In a Biden-Trump confrontationthe former president is placed between 3 to 8 percentage points over the current acting president.
Behind the figures, in the geostrategic scenarios, the first data so far outline a US presidential election based on a local agenda: overflowing migration, inflation destroying well-being, public debt on the verge of bursting the economy, increased traffic and consumption of drugs, growing numbers of deaths from overdoses and, outstandingly, the government’s incompetence to understand, attend to and present solutions to the mass shootings in streets and schools as a consequence of the freedom to buy any type of weapons.
To the bad news for Europeans, the United States finds itself in a cycle (in Arthur Schlesinger’s model) of an internal wave, with a very evident social neglect on world problems, even with greater concern for internal racist terrorism than for the decreasing Islamic terrorism. radical.
In the state of mind of the average American there is more concern for the inflation and the shootings than by learning about international conflicts, whether in Ukraine, Russia, China, North Korea or the Middle East, especially since the presence of US troops and marines abroad has greatly decreased.
The number one domestic problem in the United States today is that of migrationabove all due to the dynamics of the last few years that have blown up traditional US strategies and new ways of managing the massive arrival of people –in hundreds of thousands– at the gates of the country, especially along the southern border with Mexico, which is the most porous, vulnerable and disorganized of the American national security shield.
The latest polls are revolving around the political-electoral strength of former President Trump, and even more so because of the social contradictions that Americans are facing: Trump It has been found guilty of sexual assault –and not rape– and sentenced to pay a million-dollar fine, but even so he continues to lead the polls more for his political-nationalist-puritanical statements than for the long list of accusations queuing up for legal trials for sexual assault and rape.
President Bidenfor his part, appears overwhelmed by conflicts for which there is no solution: migration, drug trafficking and shootings, together with the evidence of a worrying growth in ultra-right racist terrorism, show a White House overwhelmed by problems and overwhelmed by the political division between the Executive and the legislative.
In the short term, President Biden finds himself trapped in economic, political and social hurricanes due to the wasteful spending caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and which led the White House to increase spending without financial balances and now Congress it refuses to increase the debt ceiling, which would imply more money in circulation and therefore greater inflationary pressure, with the aggravating circumstance that it does not mean a solution to the budget problem either, since in economics all irresponsible spending holes have to be paid for with debt and inflation.
The political-electoral trends of the United States will begin a new phase in June, once the deadline for raising the debt ceiling is met at the end of May; if Congress agrees with the White House, there will be budgetary authorization, but also greater negative effects on the economy; and if not, once again the budgetary economy will collapse, the government will have to close offices and fire non-formal employees, and social complaints will enter into electoral logic.
The great political enigma in the next three months will be in the donald trump file and the dilemma of letting him be a candidate with polls in his favor or pressing the judicial agenda to put him in jail, although running the risk that the former president will be a critical voice in the media and would have the capacity to designate the Republican candidate for the presidency and make it run on your behalf to capitalize on positive trends.
On the Democratic side there is only Biden with his heavy burden of age and political failure, Vice President Harris has never been regarded with respect as a possible candidate and several politicians far below with little chance of building a winning nomination by 2024, and among them Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist, progressive lawyer, nephew of Bobby Kennedy assassinated in 1968 as a presidential candidate and without any public office, stands out by name, but already with a statement that caused havoc because he pointed out that his uncle John F. Kennedy would have been assassinated by the CIA.
Just to confirm the local agenda of the United States in its 2024 electoral scenario, the war in Ukraine, US support and the conflicts with China matter very little to the American voter who has a very short-term survival agenda tied to daily problems.
For these reasons, of the White House the message is coming out “Houston, we have a problem”.
- Populism and inequality
- From law to reality in practice there is a long way
- Let’s think about the regions thinking about Mexico
- Rights and mining exploitation
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