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I notice that my state broadcaster, whose staff care more about american goings on than they really should, have not even bothered to write about who the other candidates are, while I distinctly remember pieces being run about Bernie and Elizabeth Warren back in 2020. It is by and large assumed by everyone Important that Biden will be the democractic nominee.
Because in 2020 there were candidates like Warren and Buttigieg who were neither ‘who?’ Nor nut jobs. Doubtless yang and Marianne williamson didn’t get write ups.
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That's pretty typical, at least here in the US. The incumbent president is generally considered guaranteed to be the party nominee. Whereas in 2020, Biden was not really sure to be the nominee even though he had previously been VP.
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The difference is that in 2024 Biden is the incumbent; 2020 was an open primary. Incumbents running for re-election are generally accepted by everyone as the de facto nominee before the primary even begins. And the party machine begins closing ranks early. Biden was essentially the Democratic nominee from the moment he announced he was running again. It was the same with Trump in 2020. There were some minor candidates running a token opposition campaign. American media might make hay of the drama on a slow news day. But most Americans will not care, and it's no surprise your foreign state broadcaster would not even bother.
It's actually become accepted wisdom among political consultants that strong primary challenges against incumbents presage bad results in the general election. Ford and Carter were both primaried before they lost in the general elections, for example. So, in practice, the party machines have increasingly worked to prevent primaries against the incumbent. Legally, nothing can stop someone from filing to run for a major party nomination. But nobody is going to buy-in. This is why RFK gave up seeking to win the Democratic primary and decided to run as an independent: even though he had a decent fraction of Democratic support, nobody in the party would defect to supporting him, and so he was limited in how much progress he could really make.
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