Joe Biden will not raise waves of enthusiasm when this Tuesday – if he fulfills what his people leaked a few days ago – he announces his candidacy for a second term as president of the United States. Between 70% and 73% of voters in general and between 51% and 52% of Democrats in particular do not want him to run in the 2024 election, according to polls conducted in mid-April by NBC News and the AP agency.
The rejection of the candidacy of the president fits with the low approval ratings that his performance continues to achieve since the disaster of the evacuation of troops in Afghanistan in August 2021, at which time support drops from a 50 % and never again exceeded this threshold. Now, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s compilation of surveys, the approval rate is 42.3%, which is a dramatic improvement from 38% in July. “Joe Biden is winning the unpopularity contest of 2024”, commented political scientist Philip Bump in The Washington Post yesterday.
Among Democrats, reluctance to run for their boss does not prevent between 88% and 81% of them from saying they will vote for him if he runs. Do they see it as a lesser evil? Maybe, but rather they see it as the only option. Because so far no major party figure has stepped up to challenge him in the primaries leading up to the Nov. 5, 2024, appointment. For now, only the anti-vaccine eccentric Robert F. Kennedy, son of Bobby Kennedy, as well as self-help author Marianne Williamson have announced they will run in the Blue Party primary.
The obvious advantage of competing from the White House itself, the fact that Biden is the only politician who has shown that he is capable of beating Donald Trump and the good results of the midterm legislatures, in which the Democrats retained the majority in the Senate and they narrowly lost that of the House of Representatives, are the factors that may have held back the potential rivals of the president: potential candidates who in any case have always been cited as an alternative in the event that Biden does not to run, and this is the case both for Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, his two rivals in 2020, and for the powerful governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Among the nearly three-quarters of respondents who reject Biden running for re-election, half point to his advanced age as a key factor against him. The president will be a fortnight away from turning 82 when voters go to the polls in 2024. So he would be 86 when his second and final term ends in January 2029.
As for Trump, the top-ranked candidate among declared and potential candidates on the conservative side, 60% of Americans as a whole and a third of Republicans believe the former president should not run in 2024 .
The conclusion is bleak: for now, all indications are that the citizens of the polarized Western superpower will reluctantly vote in the upcoming presidential elections, as the majority rejects the two most likely candidates for the final contest. A pity about the elections, if the panorama does not change.
