In a post-election news conference, President Joe Biden smiled pleasantly when NBC reporter Kristen Welker informed him that in exit polls, two-thirds of Americans said they don’t think he should run again in 2024. “How does that factor into your final decision about whether or not to run for re-election?” she asked.
“It doesn’t,” Biden answered.
The November exit polling is consistent with a New York Times/Siena College poll in July, which found that the president’s approval rating was at 33 percent nationally and 64 percent of Democratic voters would prefer that their party nominate someone else for president.
On the day after the November 8 elections, a progressive group that supported Senator Bernie Sanders’ bid for the White House in 2016 and 2020 launched a “Don’t Run Joe” campaign and sent out a press release that stated flatly, “It’s clear that Joe Biden should not be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.”
But it’s not so clear. Biden’s performance in the midterms is the strongest of any president in the last two decades. Barack Obama suffered what he famously called “a shellacking” in 2010, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and 6 seats in the Senate. In Bill Clinton’s first midterm elections in 1994, his party lost 52 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate.
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By contrast, Biden’s first midterms were a triumph. The widely predicted “red wave” of Republican victories that would blast Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill never materialized. The president’s party held the Senate, and in the House, Republicans were barely able to eke out a majority.
That probably ends any plans that nervous Democratic lawmakers may have had to solemnly walk to the White House and tell the president he lacks the support to run again. The election results provide no basis for an argument that Biden’s unpopularity would drag down the rest of the ticket.
Biden, who turns 80 years old today, said he will announce his decision “early next year” after discussing it with his family. “Our intention is to run again,” he said, “I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it.”
With former president Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday, the country may be headed for a rematch.