President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election declaration might be good or bad for the 46th president.
On Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of his 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden announced his fourth and final presidential bid in a video.
The announcement was anticipated for months.
The president has suggested he’ll run again, but he hasn’t officially declared. Aides have attributed the delay to Mr. Biden’s innate reluctance to make big decisions, his party’s lack of opposition, and Republican instability, which appears to be headed to a rematch with Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Mr. Biden told reporters: “I told you I’m planning on running. I’ll tell you soon”.
Mr. Biden deferred re-election due to the possibility of a Trump-Biden rematch.
He will be 82 on election day and is the second-oldest president in US history.
However, the president and his inner circle see the prolonged presence of the twice-impeached, indicted, and disgraced 45th president as an opportunity for Mr. Biden to return to the issues that resonated with Americans in 2020.
Aides think Mr. Trump’s projected GOP frontrunner status will allow Mr. Biden to remind people why they elected him.
They also expect Democratic turnout to exceed the record numbers who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 and Democratic candidates in elections since due to Republicans’ continued focus on restricting reproductive rights and Mr. Trump’s role in nominating Supreme Court justices who overturned abortion rights last year.
Mr. Biden and his inner circle hope to duplicate that successful 2020 run by touting the president’s triumphs over the last four years, particularly his economic program and attempts to increase US manufacturing.
According to polls, Mr. Biden’s re-election is unlikely.
The president’s re-election campaign launch polling is divided. In an NBC poll this week, 7 in 10 Americans said he should not run again, and 54% disapproved of his White House performance. After 13 US servicemen were killed by Islamic State-aligned assailants in the summer of 2021, his approval plummeted.
Those are bad numbers for any incumbent president, but they don’t tell the whole picture about Americans’ views on 2024. The president has not begun offensive campaigning, which would energize his supporters and weaken his opponents.
That’s not to say that the president’s fortunes will change once he takes the campaign trail full-time, but early polling of matches with his most likely 2024 adversary, Donald Trump, is encouraging. Mr. Biden leads his 2020 opponent by single digits in most general election surveys, as he does against former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley.
Nearly every poll shows Mr. Biden trailing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
Despite Mr. Trump’s criminal arrest and his assaults on his new competitor, Mr. DeSantis is sliding in hypothetical Trump-DeSantis GOP nomination surveys. AP and NORC research indicated that 44% of Republicans do not want the thrice impeached, criminally indicted ex-president to run. He still has the highest net favorability rating of the major 2024 Republican candidates.
Most polling indicates that Americans do not want a repeat of the 2020 election but are unenthused about the alternatives. According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, 65% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track.
