In a week where Republicans tore chunks out of each other in a bruising primary debate, the clear frontrunner, Donald Trump, was in New York, battling to save his crumbling Manhattan Empire. Meanwhile, Biden has come under increasing scrutiny from his own party, seen as more of a liability than an asset. Biden is trailing Trump in the polls, with his age leaving uncomfortable questions for Democrats. The stage is set for a tumultuous 2024.
As GOP presidential hopefuls gathered in Miami on November 8th, the real race seemed to be for second place. Perhaps they are holding out for a vice presidential consolation prize, or desperately clinging onto the possibility that they may be able to take over the reins should Trump not survive his 90+ felony charges.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley fought tooth and nail to claw away support from Trump’s protégé turned chief adversary, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, brandishing her hawkish foreign policy credentials – a hangover of the bygone Bush era. DeSantis once represented a credible challenge to the former president, but his support has since plummeted, now just 14% to Trump’s 57%. Haley is ascendent, reviving her stagnant campaign to a ‘respectable’ 8.7%. The other candidates on stage seemed to have lost their raison d’être. The provocateur Ramaswamy was the only unifying force on stage, drawing the ire of all his competitors. Haley labelled him ‘scum’ under her breath in one particularly heated moment. As the candidates wrangled about who had cosied up closest with Chinese businesses and who does or does not use TikTok, one could not help but think of the farce of it all. Where was the real leader of the Grand Old Party?
In fact, Trump was a mere 10 miles away, already campaigning for the presidential election. Earlier that week, however, the former president was testifying in New York. The man who built his identity around being a successful billionaire businessman now faces the prospect of losing control of his empire. The presiding judge has already ruled that Trump regularly lied on his financial statements and exaggerated his net worth. Trump – despite decrying the ‘witch hunt’ – voluntarily appears in court, conscious that every time he is indicted, the campaign donations come flooding in, and his popularity rises with his core base. Judge Engoron has lambasted the former president’s political posturing, ordering his lawyer to control his client, stating: “This is not a political rally”.
Trump faces mounting legal difficulties across the country, with his greatest peril in Georgia, where he is being pursued by the state, not the federal government. If convicted, he would not have the ability to pardon himself as president. The racketeering (RICO) case centres on the ‘fake electors’ plot and the infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump asked him to “find 11,780 votes”. In recent weeks, Trump’s co-defendants have been peeling off, one by one, mafia-style, to save themselves, pushing Trump further and further into legal peril. Trump faces the genuine prospect of either prison or the presidency – a cell or the Oval Office come the end of next year.
If Trump does find himself imprisoned, the GOP will find itself at a dangerous crossroads – they can either rally around another candidate or they can follow their leader into the abyss. The guardrails of American democracy were badly damaged by Trump’s election denialism in 2020 and the country has only grown more divided. In a recent speech on Veterans Day, Trump was widely accused of echoing fascist rhetoric as he centred his vitriol on the “vermin” who “lie and steal and cheat on elections”. If Trump were to lose the next election, he would surely cry foul. If Trump were to be imprisoned, his chokehold on the Republican Party could lead his followers to take up arms. And if Trump were to win the next election, we would likely see a further erosion, or indeed the destruction, of the democratic norms that have come to define the United States. There seems to be no eventuality that does not further divide the nation.
The existential threat posed by Trump also seems set to push the GOP further into the abyss as Republicans fight for the soul of their party. In Miami, Ramaswamy openly called on Ronna McDaniel, the Chairwoman of the Republican Party, to resign citing the spate of recent electoral failures. In Washington, far-right House Republicans ousted their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and then struggled to fill the very void they opened. Given all this turmoil, shouldn’t President Biden be cruising to another victory?
It appears perhaps not, with a recent NYT/Siena Poll putting Biden’s prospects of re-election into question. Trump leads Biden in five of the six major swing states. David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, made headlines when he questioned whether it was in the country’s best interests for Biden to run for re-election.
Of course, polls one year out from an election hardly predict the outcome (if they did, we would likely be coming to the end of eight years of a Hilary Clinton presidency), but the poll has exposed some uncomfortable trends for the Democrats. Perhaps the most concerning is the breakdown in Biden’s “Grand Coalition” of supporters: non-white voters and the young. While incumbents can often struggle to reinvigorate their base, Biden is doing especially badly, with the New York Times noting, in its Times/Siena poll: “Overall, Mr. Trump earns more than 20 percent [support] among Black voters, a tally that would be unprecedented in the post-Civil Rights Act era”.
It is the apathy among young voters to turn out and vote for an octogenarian that has fuelled debate over whether the Democrats should replace Biden with a more youthful candidate. Indeed, the same NYT/Siena poll recorded that while 44% of voters in battleground states would vote for Biden, 48% would back any ‘generic Democrat’. In a new CNN poll, Biden’s approval rate stood at 39%, and 58% say that his policies have made economic conditions worse; 67% of Democrats say the party should nominate someone other than Biden. Biden faces continual questions about his age and mental acuity, draining energy from his campaign and raising uncomfortable questions for Democrats: if Biden is such a liability, why don’t Democrats make the switch?
Despite Biden’s legislative successes, including passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, voters are not so generous in rewarding long-term and incremental improvements. Establishment Democrats are reticent to field another nominee given Biden’s unique position as the only person who can claim to have beaten Donald Trump in a presidential election. Moreover, there is simply not much time left; the little-known Democratic congressman from Minnesota, Dean Phillips, put his head above the parapet, only to be swiftly criticized, sidelined, and ridiculed by the Democratic Establishment. With the DNC changing the presidential primary calendar to favour Biden, it is clear there is little appetite for change. Likewise, nobody wants a repeat of the Ted Kennedy fiasco in 1980 when the Democratic congressman launched a campaign against incumbent President Carter, only for Carter to win the primary, but his campaign mortally wounded.
Herein lies another paradox. Despite Biden’s perilous approval ratings and the apparent collapse of his coalition, the Democrats keep winning big. After halting the arrival of the mythical, but much heralded, ‘red wave’ in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats have successfully used the issue of abortion rights to galvanize support. The night before the third Republican primary debate, the Democrats swept to victory in several states – motivated to protect abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022 which removed the federal right to an abortion. Voters in Ohio, the quintessential purple state turned Trump stronghold, voted 56.6% in favour of establishing a constitutional right to abortion. In Virginia, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s aspirations for a 15-week limit were thwarted when Republicans not only failed to capture the State Senate but lost the House of Delegates.
In Kentucky, it is almost unbelievable that the same state that produced Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul re-elected their Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Daniel Cameron, his Republican rival, tried to link him to Biden, but Beshear did not bite. It seems that at least in red country, Biden proved more of a liability than an asset. The issue of abortion rights may very well be the Democratic Party’s saving grace if they can successfully energise young people to go out and vote while also reminding voters that it was Trump who appointed the very judges who would go on to rule in the pivotal Dobbs case. To quote the political commentator Dean Obeidallah, forget Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid”. It’s abortion, stupid.
Thus, one year out, the 2024 presidential election is a tale of paradoxes. Democrats keep winning big on the issue of abortion, but Biden looks set to lose the election to his deeply divisive predecessor. Likewise, Republicans continue to engage in destructive infighting while the clear GOP favourite battles to stay out of prison. The United States, once the great paragon of democracy and stability, looks set to face its most existential threat since the Civil War. Now, the country must ask itself: “Quo Vadis”?
Is the minority still the majority?
It has been years since infamous private member societies such as ‘The Bullingdon Club’ or ‘The Piers Gaveston Society’ have reigned supreme at Oxford; the university and students alike condemning their behaviour. It has also been around twenty years since the proportion of state school-educated students surpassed that of privately educated students. On paper, it looks like the tables have turned on those educated at the most elite schools in the country, but as a state school-educated member of the university it doesn’t always feel that way.
I was lucky enough to attend an extremely high-performing state comprehensive. In 2021, when I won a place, so too did fifty-one other students from my college to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. This is an extremely impressive number for a nonselective school. However, when you take into account that there were one-thousand six hundred students in my year group, that’s actually only 3.25% of the student body. In the same year, St Paul’s Girls School, one of the top-performing private girls’ schools in the country, had a staggering 46.9% success rate.
But facts have never made good news stories. Since the proportion of state school students at Oxford has risen, so has the number of screaming headlines in the national press. Papers such as The Times love to shout about private school students who’ve ‘lost out’ on their chances in the name of equality. ‘Private pupils shunned by Oxbridge are being ‘driven overseas’, ‘Going private is putting our children’s Oxbridge chances at risk, parents fear’, and ‘White private school boys are the new disadvantaged, says Cambridge academic’ are just a few real article headlines which have been published in the past couple years.
The reality of the situation is, of course, a little more complex. Only seven percent of the population attends private school and yet they make up around 30% of Oxford students. However, the crux of the issue isn’t so much about the weight of the name of your school in relation to your success, but about the things you’ve learned there which give you an advantage. In my experience Oxford is still very tailored towards the culture of these schools; before these pupils even attend Oxford or Cambridge, they know the secrets. And it’s this that really makes it feel as if, despite statistics, state school-educated pupils are still in the minority.
Before I went to Oxford I had never really been asked where I went to school. The question at first surprised me. Why would anyone know of my school and what relevance would it have to our possible friendship? However, I quickly learned that for attendees of those top London private schools, it held a meaning, a sort of secret code. It provided an instant bond, an opportunity to discuss mutual friends and experiences only available to those who attended those types of schools. Which also, for those of us who were not a part of it, unknowingly created a divide. Subconsciously, these initial alliances create a feeling that there is a ‘group’ you could never be a part of, or rather one that you would have to work to understand. And indeed, you do. Never have I known the names of so many independent schools in and around London, nor been able to add to a conversation by adding an anecdote of another friend at the university who attended the same place.
But the issue is not just in the where-did-you-go-to-school conversations. There are so many other traditions which new students have to familiarise themselves with. Before coming to Oxford, I wonder how many of you had heard of matriculation, formal hall, or sub fusc. For each of these things, I felt words like this made me feel completely in the dark. What was the dress code, and how should you behave? Luckily for me, I had a friend from school who went a year earlier than myself who told me I needed to get hold of some ‘black tie’ wear for formal. Black tie was not a concept I was familiar with, and only after some research was I able to look online for a formal dress that would be appropriate. My only experience with ‘formal’ dress before coming to Oxford was prom in year eleven or the occasional wedding. Despite being assured that many others were in the same position as me, my lack of knowledge made me feel stupid. Surely by nineteen, I should have known how to do something as easy as get dressed in the right clothes.
Of course, though, these traditions are not something you have to buy into, and it’s not as if you’ll be penalized for not taking part. Wadham is a shining example of a college that rejects them by replacing balls with ‘Wadstock’ and scrapping formals altogether. Wadham might prove that things have shifted, and that the University is taking steps to move away from the focus on private school culture. But the very fact that Wadham has chosen to reject these traditions is very telling. Surely we only need to reject the things that impact our lives. Wadham’s rejection in fact shows just how entrenched the rest of Oxford is in these old-school traditions. All of which fits nicely in with what students from private schools have spent years preparing for.
Inevitably, these feelings also slip into the academic life of Oxford. As someone who is used to classes of thirty-plus pupils, tiny tutorials at first felt uncomfortable and exposing to me. In the first few weeks, I held back ideas and stumbled nervously over my words. Private schools by contrast pride themselves on small class numbers and much more individual-focused learning, which I can assure you is something I wish I had had more experience of in that first tutorial. I had never envied the private school experience before an Oxford tutorial, but I had to learn quickly how to build up the confidence to effectively communicate my ideas. This was a confidence that had been instilled into my counterparts for at least five years. It didn’t take long for me to get a handle on this, but there were certainly many awkward silences and cringe-worthy moments in the first few weeks which made the process feel more difficult.
Eventually, putting on ‘black tie’ becomes as easy as putting on your pyjamas, and a one-on-one tutorial is simply part of your weekly routine. However, that doesn’t shake the feeling that you’re often playing catch up with this culture. And the onus is on the state school students to adapt, learn the codes, and build up our confidence to a private school level. Not all of this is bad, but it is different. The media can keep on saying that the system has changed to favour state school pupils, but the truth is that I spent my first year striving to adapt to the lifestyle at Oxford. This isn’t to say that I didn’t also have a great time – it has in fact been one of the best years of my life so far. But it’s also undeniable that many of my privately educated peers didn’t have to waste time thinking about this, feeling comfortable from their very first day.