President Biden Announces 2024 Reelection Run, Pundits Hardest Hit
Former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden speaking with attendees at the Moving America Forward Forum hosted by United for Infrastructure at the Student Union at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 2020. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
Spare a thought for the death of political punditry’s dream booking of the 2024 presidential election. President Joe Biden is officially running for reelection.
Claiming that his presidency has pulled the country back from the brink on all those fronts, Biden underlined his ambition to turn what he had once pitched as a transitional presidency into something far more transformational.
“The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer,” Biden said in the video. “I know what I want the answer to be. This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for reelection.”
For Biden, 80, the announcement marks a pivotal moment in a political career that has spanned a half-century. The decision may defy the wishes of some Democratic voters clamoring for a different standard-bearer — one who is younger, more progressive and more reflective of the party’s diversity — while also underscoring Biden’s strength among party leaders, including those who believe he has the best chance of defeating Donald Trump or another Republican.
The 2024 race is expected to be the final campaign of a figure who has run seven races for the U.S. Senate and sought the presidency or vice presidency four times. It will shape the legacy of a man who rose from a county council in Delaware to become one of the youngest U.S. senators in history, a partner to the country’s first Black president — and ultimately the 46th president as a pandemic swept the country.
Biden’s announcement moves the United States one step closer to a likely tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, as former president Donald Trump pushes for a rematch with Biden after more than two years of falsely claiming that he was the true winner in 2020. Trump has already announced his own candidacy and begun exchanging barbs with other Republican hopefuls.
* * *
As for Biden, polls suggest that few Democrats are enthusiastic about the notion of his running again, but many believe he may be their best bet for keeping the White House.
There was no version of the Joe Biden story short of – God forbid – something physically happening to the man that was going to prevent him from running for reelection. Having grabbed the brass ring on the third try over 35 years, there was nothing outside of himself that was going to dissuade the President into voluntarily giving up The White House. Years worth of theories, speculation, and 4-D chess moves by political prognosticators has now petered out to the powerful pull of inevitability.
Fear not, fans of fabulous political fictionalization of forthcoming events. Like the ghost of Ron Popeil rising in a popup ad before your YouTube clip to bellow “But wait, there’s more,” the chattering classes have seamlessly switched from one narrative rut on the road to 2024 to the parallel rut to keep the electoral drama going. President Biden is too old, and his favorability rating is too low. Both accusations have validity. Biden is already running up the stats on his “oldest president” record, and in a normal political environment his polling numbers would not only be concerning but would set off the klaxons in the DNC to do something different.
But these are not normal political times, and 2024 is not going to be a normal election — if such a thing ever existed to start with.
Biden’s age and polling are secondary concerns for a Democratic Party that has no one else even remotely close to being able to carry Biden’s 2020 winning coalition to another victory. Biden, like it or not, is Team Blue’s best and only option in 2024. His age will be a factor, unless he’s running against a 77-come-June Donald Trump and MAGA’s freight train-worth of baggage and controversies. Even if someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis knocks Trump off in the Republican primary, there has already been plenty of national coverage to transfer the narrative mantle from the old Big Bad of Trump to DeSantis. Such a primary is going to be brutal, messy, and — win or lose — Trump is not going to go quietly or without wounding his competition out of spite.
As for approval polling, it is fair enough to point out President Biden’s numbers. The President has been underwater on the approval polls mostly since the August, 2021 messy exit from Afghanistan which marked the end of any “honeymoon” period of positive polling numbers. Biden’s numbers bumped along the 50/50 line until November of 2021 where they diverged for the last time. President Biden’s worst stretch of approval polling to date came in late May through early July of 2022, a period that saw Roe v. Wade overturned with the Dobbs decisions, the Uvalde school massacre, and stalled progress in congress of his political agenda. Since then, with his approval bounding around the low to mid-40s for the most part, the President’s numbers have been pretty consistent.
But approval numbers are taken in the vacuum of what the polled public thinks of the President. Elections don’t happen in that vacuum; voters are picking between two candidates, and the last time Americans looked at a ballot with Joe Biden at the top they took him over Trump in record numbers. That was before a lot of Trump-related stuff happened after the 2020 election, it should be noted. Joe Biden won the presidency mostly by being not Trump, and there have been plenty more things to cause more Trump fatigue since then.
For as loud and messy as the 2024 presidential election is going to be, there is a very good chance that in the end it might turn out to be one of the most predictable elections. All those think pieces on how Biden wouldn’t run again, or would resign, or commentators like me who got it completely wrong and thought he shouldn’t run in the first place with his history, drama and suspense are a lot more fun than just admitting the obvious. That’s why conspiracy theories make better movies and get more clicks than straight truth or by-the-book history. Every March folks love to pick the wild underdog in their March Madness brackets, only for the usual power school to win it all anyway, most of the time. But picking the blue blood program, or team with the obviously best players to win, is derided as “taking chalk” and being unimaginative. It would be more fun to pontificate about what might be, but the honest assessment must analyze what is, not the could be.
President Biden, flaws and all, polling and all, age and all, is the incumbent president of the United States of America. Running for reelection as a sitting president has tremendous advantages. He will be running against a Republican Party nominee that most likely is going to be Donald Trump, who he has already defeated with record voting turnout. If another GOP nominee gets past Trump, Biden will be facing a fractured, angry, and directionless party that will also have Donald Trump not being a good loser and not handing the torch to his replacement atop the Republican Party.
As he officially starts his campaign for 2024, President Biden is in the best position of any candidate to be the President of the United States come Inauguration Day 2025. You can deride it as taking chalk, but unless something really drastic changes the dynamics of this primary, the fans of fabulous political fictionalization of forthcoming events and political prognosticators will once again have their dreams dashed by the boring, mostly predictable result. Joe Biden’s second term is far from inevitable, but it is by far the mostly likely outcome.
Let the drama, such as it will be, commence. Just don’t be surprised if the most predictable outcome, is.
I believe Biden may have been put on this planet for one reason, and that one reason may be to save us from the potentially irrevocable damage a return to a Trump presidency would do to the country. We can still correct. If Biden does win re-election, which I hope he does, it will be a sign that God still has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.Report
Amen to that, sibling.Report
I agree and wish Uncle Joe well. If only he wasn’t so elderly.Report
You mean he wasn’t put on this earth to give us amusing Onion headlines?Report
That’s just a positive second order effect.Report
It was the writers laying down a seed that pays off 6 seasons later.Report
My phone chirped loudly at me at three o’clock this morning. This is unusual, and it had the added benefit of waking me up since I was sleeping poorly anyway as per usual. So I rolled my groggy-but-no-longer-asleep self out of bed to see what was so damn important. There was exactly one (1) notification for me:
Really? Really??? For this you wake me up at three in the damn morning? Is this supposed to some surprise me? It’d be news if he didn’t do this. Ugh.
Took me twenty minutes to fall asleep again. Need to change the setting on this silly thing…Report
I think it was all but certain that 2024 would be a Biden/Trump rematch as soon as the 2020 Presidential election was called for Biden. Anyone who thought otherwise was fooling themselves.Report
Any change in VP?
What is Stacy Abrams up to?Report
I like Stacy Abrams and would seriously consider chiseling her face on a mountain somewhere but I do not see any significant lift to showing VP Harris the door to nominate Stacy Abrams. Lots of foofaraw and no benefit as far as I can see.Report
Concur. There is no margin for error. Can’t over think, can’t let anything go unforced. Kamala Harris’ weaknesses are unfortunate but I also don’t get the sense she’s a particularly polarizing figure, even when she has tried to go out on a limb in ways that might have made her more of one. Abrams nets no one new and maybe even loses a few given the high visibility of the elections in Georgia. Shes also lost state wide elections twice now in a place Biden may have to win.Report
All electoral analysis is warped by Trump’s astonishingly steady base of support.
If you voted for Trump in 2016, you almost certainly voted for him in 2020, and will certainly vote for him in 2024.
There is no set of facts, no possible events which can change this.
Whether Trump faces Biden, or Harris, or Newsom, or Abrams won’t have any statistically meaningful change in the outcome.
The only difference between 2016/ 2020/ 2024 is the changing profile of the voters, and base enthusiasm and turnout.Report
This is just bad analysis, Chip. Abrams lost a statewide election in a toss up to lean red state that Warnock managed to win a second time. The GOP dropped multiple elections last cycle (including the Senate race in GA) by nominating obviously unfit people.
Bottom line is candidates matter. We need to stop worrying so much about appearances and look for people with a record of coming through in the clutch, even where it’s ugly. Maybe especially where it’s ugly.Report
And the candidates kind of, ya know, influence the profile of the voters, the base enthusiasm, the turnout AND which way the low info/swing voters go Chip(I’m bemused you left that last one out). Could you imaging dear ol Bernie and his *wheeze* Revolution flipping Georgia in 2020? I can’t.Report
Downballot, candidates absolutely count for all the reasons you said.
At the Presidential level, when Trump exists, his floor of support is around 47% of the electorate and all the states he won in 2020.
Over the next year and a half, there is nothing that will change this. No gaffe, no outrageous comment, no national or international events will move the needle because to date, none have.
The results in 2024 will be that either Trump or Biden wins a very narrow victory, coming down to just a few states like Arizona and Georgia.
And even downballot, we won’t see remarkable swings like from 1960 to 1964 or from 1928 to 1932 (Narrow loss to blowout landslide).
The reason for this is that the contested issues in our time are not issues upon which people can really change all that much.
People might swing from “This governor is great for the economy! This governor terrible on the economy!” if they were really thinking of pocketbook issues, but they aren’t.
So even in races for school board elections or zoning board commissioners, will hinge on “So, about those drag queens…”Report
Sure, for the sake of argument, let’s agree that is Trump’s floor. I note that you aren’t saying it’s his ceiling. Are you really saying that if the Dems had nominated Harris, or Williamson, or Bernie, that the outcome of 2020 would have been the same? I grant alternative history is inherently nonsensical but I don’t follow your reasoning.Report
I’m probably overstating my case but…
The actual outcome of Trump/Clinton and Trump/Biden was very close to the same.
A few tens of thousand votes out of 150 million cast would turned either election.
And 2024 will be that close as well.
The vote is very much a referendum on Trump, not so much Biden.
Sure, if Biden disappeared and was replaced by someone else, a certain percentage of the Dem base might be less, or more inspired to turn out. Let’s say, maybe 1 to 2 percent nationally maybe more in certain precincts..
And in a razor thin election that makes the difference.
But that’s just the point. It is going to be razor thin where even things like the weather, or behavior by the state election officials will be pivotal.
What I’m aiming at is the horserace punditry that will spend the next eighteen months bloviating over campaign minutia and details and gossip but miss the fundamental that just a shade under 50% of the American electorate really, really, want to install a guy who promises to end the experiment with Republican democracy.
They aren’t flocking to him because of a gaffe by Biden or the promise of a better economy or fears of crime or schools or anything else.Report
I hope not.
It would be nice to have him lose by a larger amount.Report
Trump’s floor and his ceiling should be the same.
Nor do I believe 47%. That percentage includes both his base and the rest of the GOP. About 32% of the country thinks well of him, 54% dislike him.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3648507-trumps-favorability-rating-drops-to-new-low-poll/Report
Trump’s floor is 0%. That should be rather obvious — its not that people won’t vote for him, it is that he will be dead before attaining the nomination.
This is also Biden’s floor, in a strange coincidence. However, actuarial odds of a ten year term are at an all time low, so… the likelihood of malfeasance is very low.
I cannot say the same for the odds of Trump attaining the Republican Nomination. He picked a fight with the wrong people.Report
Team Red Floor is probably 45% +/- which just means that any idiot with the Team Red branding can likely command 40%+ of the vote no matter what.
It’s also Team Blue’s floor too. In a binary first-past-the-post machine, the floors are very, very high.
What we don’t really have good estimations on is how realignments / new parties are born… historically they tend to tumble in weird directions until it crystalizes into a new coalition/party that isn’t really definable until after it happens.Report
Trying to overthrow the gov takes us into new territory.Report
I agree, Harris seems just fine but hasn’t accomplished or done anything that impresses me. But, again, she seems just fine and she’s done a perfectly solid job as Veep. I love Abrams but her strength seems to be more in organizing than in political campaigning. Put her in charge of organizing something nationally or regionally instead. Or let her do what she wishes, Abrams deserves considerable deference but not adulation and Harris doesn’t deserve to be shown the door.Report
Pretty much. Maybe the only person that I could hear an argument for would be Michelle Obama. And even then I would still probably err against messing with it given the unknowns and the fact that she has no experience in elected office. Harris is the boring choice and I think boring is good, especially with Republicans going all in as the party of crazy.Report
This is a really good perspective for evaluating Harris. The VP’s first job is “don’t eff anything up,” and the VP’s second job is “help politically, somehow; appeal to a group the President doesn’t appeal to so much.”
Also, please be on time and nicely-dressed for all those overseas funerals and know how we want you to vote if the Senate splits right down the middle.
She’s done all of those things.
She ain’t Dick Cheney or even Al Gore, but she ain’t Dan Quayle or Spiro Agnew, either. She’s doing the job of VP’ing just fine. N.b. this does not necessarily mean she’s demonstrated she’s ready to run for the top spot.Report
I actually think we all owe Dan Quayle a pinch of respect for apparently advising Mike Pence against cooperating with Trump’s plan on 1/6. History is weird.Report
Concur. If getting advice from Quayle helped Pence find the fortitude within himself to stand up to pressure from Trump and his machinery, then let us honor that act of service.Report
I assumed that the Quayle comment was just an offhand jab. He’s regarded as a good VP, no?Report
I am completely serious about him deserving respect for doing the right thing when he got the call.
I was still a kid when he was in office so don’t have strong views of his job as VP. My main recollection is the gaffes, the potato thing, etc. but I take for granted that isn’t a fair metric to judge by, especially when I’m here stumping for Joe Biden. I do hold a good bit of respect for the HW administration for successfully managing one of the most consequential geopolitical moments in modern history.Report
I too am serious about offering respect for Quayle because of this moment. We will never know if Quayle was actually ready for the top job had something happened to Bush The Elder; gratefully for all involved we never had to find out. But I’ll allow that there is a very substantial possibility that Quayle would have done just fine had it ever come to that.Report
Off track a bit, but it’s weird that the Potato episode defines Quayle. What really got to the heart of the matter was when Lloyd Bentsen ‘destroyed’ him in the VP debate after Quayle attempted to fight off the young/inexperienced criticism by comparing his length of service to Kennedy’s; which drew the now famous line: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
That’s a near perfect retort and it ‘won’ the debate; what’s interesting to me is that Quayle thought he was making a ‘factual’ statement about time in Govt. while Bentsen made it a ‘qualitative’ assessment about the man.
Also, Quayle had been using this approach publicly to defend against the obvious question of his age/experience (he was 41)… so Bentsen knew that the question was going to come up from the moderators *and* what Quayle was going to imply. Apparently Bentsen used a similar line in practice — but as with all great rhetoric, he improved it to a devastating point when he delivered it live.
Even though Bush/Quayle beat Dukakis/Bentsen decisively; that moment is what crystalized Quayle as the ingénue bambi of a VP.
Jim Lehrer & Quayle talking about ‘the debate’ in 1999:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/debatingourdestiny/interviews/quayle.html
Rhetorically it’s an echo of Reagan’s epic line in ’79 vs. Mondale:
“I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
But, delivered with the typical Reagan flair, the moderators, the audience, and Mondale himself all laughed.Report
I mostly remember Quayle for his public feud with a fictional TV character.Report
Anticipating Twitter… a man ahead of his time.Report
Which one, Bart Simpson or Murphy Brown? (The latter was weird; he was criticizing a character who had an unwanted pregnancy and chose to keep and raise the child.)Report
I believe that that misunderstands the criticism.
He was criticizing the writers who wrote Murphy Brown to have a kid out of wedlock and that this would be okay.
For what it’s worth, in this, the criticism was somewhat accurate. The kid stopped being an interesting plot point shortly thereafter and the show continued without the kiddo making much of an impact on Murphy Brown’s (fictional) life.Report
I was thinking Candace Bergen. Completely forgot about the Simpsons.
So many stupid battles, so little time as VP.Report
As was pointed out at the time, when Reagan made that joke he had the same life expectancy as Mondale. When you get to your 70’s, you have already survived the common risks of, say, a heart attack or cancer in your 60’s, risks Mondale had yet to face.
As it happened, however, Mondale did survive those risks. He and Reagan both died at 93.Report
Yes, I remember how the underwriter’s statistical union won the spin battle… 🙂
Dude, people laughed at the disarming quip and rhetorically that angle was effectively cut-off — not because of facts, but because everyone smiled at the joke if you tried to bring it up.
In sales we call that inoculation you can’t deny the fact, so you bring it up first to ‘deal with it’ and then when the other team brings it up, the ‘it’s been dealt with’ narrative kicks in. I mean, Mondale was ONLY 51 at the time.
Bentsen’s quip was equally effective… but in the opposite way; more of an infection, a meme even. It persists to this day. A1 quality rhetorical device.Report
By whom?Report
“[Harris] seems just fine and she’s done a perfectly solid job as Veep.”
Problem is, there were a lot of little girls out there who were really hoping for something beyond “just fine and a perfectly solid job”.Report
Remember the baker on Sesame Street who would come out and yell something like “THREE BIRTHDAY CAKES!” and then fall down the stairs?
If a VP can avoid doing that, the VP gets a B-. There’s not a *WHOLE* lot the VP can do to get above a B+.Report
A VP who doesn’t have to resign for taking kickbacks, can spell “potato”, doesn’t advocate torture, and can refuse to aid a coup without other people’s advice is above the recent average.Report
Who doesn’t want an epic politician, businessperson or superhero to emerge that looks like one’s self? Sure. But who can blame another person for not being epic? That is the kind of disapprobation one can only morally level at oneself.Report
Genuinely curious about the Left’s infatuation with Stacy Abrams. I just don’t get it.
As a distant observer, she appears to be a grievance candidate who consistently loses elections.
Also, how does Team Biden credibly attack Trump’s election denialism when his running mate has boisterously claimed her elections were “stolen”?
Seems like unnecessary baggage to me.Report
Stacy Abrams has been highly successful in organizing left leaning voters in a purple state to move the ball on Senate candidates twice now. She has lessons to teach and we want to learn.
There’s also nuance to the denialism claims that Trump lacks. He keeps claiming – against a mountain of evidence – that fraudulent/illegal votes cost him his reelection. Abrams accused Kemp – who as secretary of state was overseeing his own election to a higher office at the time – of taking actions to suppress voter turn out. She never denied her defeat or refused to go along with the vote count he ultimately reported. Abrams was focused on access, and her refusal to concede was aimed at that.
That aside she is not getting VP Harris job anytime soon.Report
The thing that folks seem to misremember is that Biden offered Abrams the VP position.
He wanted to announce something like “It’s going to be Biden/Abrams!” when there were still a half dozen people in the race and she declined saying “I’m going to wait to see who the primary picks.” Lemme see if I can find the statement…
Ah. Here’s the story that Buzzfeed News (rip) ran at the time:
A few short months later, after the chaff had been blown away and Biden was going to be the nominee, she pointed out that, yep, she was open to being the VP pick.
Hello? Hello? I SAID I AM OPEN TO BEING THE VP PICK!!! HELLO???Report
I don’t know. I mean, I’ll take your word for it, but how do give her credit for senate candidate success while ignoring her own failure as a candidate in those elections? Tickets were split and not in her favor.
I don’t think the nuance you lay out on the difference of election denial is something that will be successfully communicated to non-partisans. But agree, I don’t see her replacing Harris. Someone else might, but not her.Report
The initial Senate special election wins were in 2020 – two years after she lost to Kemp the first time. One would assume she learned a few things in that time as did her organization. It may also be true that she’s not a good candidate but a great organizer.Report
I’m a left-leaning person who thinks Abrams is kind of overrated. If Abrams had been able to get as much black support as Hillary Clinton did in either of her runs for Governor, she’d be Governor right now.
Well, she does seem to be an effective organizer, a lot of the shift in Georgia is happening by just younger people being able to vote, and lots of left-leaning voters moving to Atlanta.
She got a lot of hype in 2018 for looking like she did something singular in Georgia, but 2020 & 2022 proved that actually, the state was already shifting.Report
Because middle-aged women of color are probably the closest thing the Democratic Party has to a base and Biden can’t be seen as dumping the first woman of color to reach the Vice Presidency even if it disappoints the Kamala is a Cop libertarian bros who fit into the meme about liking to argue from a position of devil’s advocate because nothing hurts them because they are middle-class white guys.Report
The argument that she may not be bringing a whole bunch but kicking her to the curb will have a dear cost is one that makes sense.
We’ll see who Trump allows to latch onto him and see if the VP debate moves opinion so much as a point.Report
IIRC the Harris Pence debate was a big snoozer. I didn’t even remember if it happened in light of the bizarre spectacle the Biden Trump debate was. I googled it and the big news coming out seems to have been: (i) that it was traditional and dull especially compared to the craziness of the top of the ticket debate and (ii) at one point a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head.Report
Yeah, the VP is supposed to be the “attack dog” or something like that and Harris might do well in that role against (insert VP here) because I doubt that (insert VP here) will come across as anything but demure when compared to Trump.
(We might get a handful of folks saying “even worse than Trump” but, like with DeSantis, their hearts won’t be in it.)Report
But the fly survived!Report
The most startling part of the Harris Pence debate was in the aftermath, when a newspaper broke blackout to print “Pence is gravely ill with COVID19.” This was an unforced error.
There’s a reason why there weren’t any more debates after the Vice Presidential.Report
At least we don’t have to waste time with the spectacles of primaries.Report
People who should know better are begging for somebody to primary Biden. Their key arguments seem to be that Biden is not good on their key pet issue and this issue is that most important issue, a human rights travesty if it doesn’t happen, and, these are all white people in their late thirties and above bringing up this point, Biden is a white man who doesn’t represent today’s woke intersectional diverse youth. “And a pony” and the fantasies that exists in the heads of some Democratic voters are going to be the death of us.Report
Here’s Marianne Williamson:
Report
I wonder if the voices in Ms. Williamson’s head narrated that statement for her?Report
Chicks. What can you do?
But the part about “The positions I support are considered moderate in every other advanced democracy, and they should be in ours as well” is a fairly boilerplate lefty position and in the absence of Bernie acting like Bernie, we’re going to have Williamson acting like Williamson.
There isn’t just a Populist right out there that is thirsty for Populism. (Heck, Trump tapped into this in 2016 to the surprise of hella people.)
There’s a Populist left. And the size of it ain’t getting smaller, year-to-year.Report
People don’t want to confront the meaning of “Florida voted for Trump and voted for a minimum-wage increase”.Report
Which is?Report
I mean, it’s not that complicated – people are fine with left-leaning economics, they just don’t want to vote for the party that’s allied with the Other in their view, whether the Other is immigrants, black people, feminists, LGBT folks, or whomever the Other is to that specific voter.
Could be as simple as their annoying wine Mom cousin or sister.Report
Here’s David Atkins talking about this very thing:
https://twitter.com/DavidOAtkins/status/1651281534702460928
Tl;Dr is that both the liberal and conservative voters are abandoning the economic conservative side of the axis, gravitating to the economic liberal side.
But the “Conservative party” voters are increasingly clustering at the socially liberal end of the axis.
The takeaway from his analysis is that while there are plenty of “conservative party” voters occupying the economic liberal positions, they don’t place much priority on those positions; They place a lot more priority on the social positions.
So even if they prefer Social Security, they will happily vote for someone who plans to destroy it, if it means satisfying their social priorities like hurting drag queens.Report
(This also explains why conservative Blacks continue to vote Democrat.)Report
Oh sure, a Charlie Baker/Larry Hogan-led GOP could rule the US for generations, much like center-right parties have ruled Europe for most of the past 50 years, but the Right wants it allReport
I doubt it has anything to do with her gender. She likely borrowed them from Yang.Report
Oh, I was running with “the voices in her head”.Report
They might come out of her new age crystals too.Report
It’s ok Lee, it’s just the internet. It’s an “angels dancing on the head of pins” question as to whether the true libertarians or true leftists could fill more school busses but no one doubts the number of busses filled would not be particularly large.Report
“We GOTTA nominate Biden, we GOTTA, he’s ELECTABLE, and right now defeating Trump is the most important thing! We can worry about social progress later, when we’re safe.”
(four years pass)
“Primary Biden? Why rock the boat? Let’s just stick with a known quantity. He’s got a proven track record of not really causing problems, and do you want to wreck that now? Let’s just wait four more years for everything to settle down and then we’ll see about changing things…”Report
Most of the Biden won’t/can’t/shouldn’t run in 2024 came from the Left of Biden. I don’t think there was much doubt that as long as Biden wanted to run, he’d run.
That said, I’ll reiterate that he’s out of gas. Might be there’s just enough in the tank to beat Trump Redux, but throw in any sort of confounding factor and I don’t think he’s got the juice to overcome it. I’m not saying the Dems have a better choice; but the hot-house campaign from your basement in 2020 isn’t going to repeat itself. There’s a lot of Risk in a Biden campaign.Report
Yes, and since the non-left part of the Democratic Party is both the party’s center of gravity policy wise AND the overwhelming majority of its actual voting constituency Biden has a pretty good lock on the nomination.
I don’t doubt Joe is tired but he ostensibly leaped into the race due to Trump and it looks like Trump is going to be in the race again.
Perhaps there’s risk in Biden running again, there’s risk in everything, but the risk of trying to replace Biden is considerably greater and the Democratic party has become a rather (lowercase c) conservative party.Report