Neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump, the leading presidential candidates for their respective parties, seems to have any plans to participate in primary debates in 2024.
The Democratic National Committee isn’t organizing any debates, which has drawn condemnation from Biden’s two Democratic challengers — anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson, who also sought the nomination in 2020 — as well as from some figures on the right, including Georgia Republican Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene.
And Trump signaled on his social network TruthSocial Tuesday that he wouldn’t be participating in the GOP primary debates. “I see that everybody is talking about the Republican Debates, but nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing them,” he wrote. “When you’re leading by seemingly insurmountable numbers, and you have hostile Networks with angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors asking the ‘questions,’ why subject yourself to being libeled and abused?”
In Biden’s case, it’s nothing out of the norm for the party of the incumbent president to forgo primary debates when they’re running for reelection. At least the last four sitting presidents, including Trump, did not participate in primary debates when they sought a second term. That’s by design: The parties do not want to entertain challengers when the incumbent president typically has an inherent electoral advantage.
It might be more unusual for a candidate not to participate in a debate in an open primary, as is the case with Trump. But he’s also in the rare position of a former president who has only served one term, and he has little to gain by participating as the clear frontrunner, leading in the polls by more than 20 points. “It’s smart for him to not want to give anybody else all that free airtime,” said Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in governance studies and director of the Center for Effective Public…
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