President Joe Biden launched a reelection bid like none before it on Tuesday with a call for Americans to choose him again to save democracy – less than three years after his defeat of Donald Trump was supposed to restore normality and unite the country.
Biden’s quest for a second term will unfold amid what would normally be deeply unpromising circumstances, with his approval rating languishing in the low 40s, with the country exhausted by successive crises after pandemic isolation ceded to a battle with soaring inflation. Polls show that a majority of voters – and even a majority of Democrats – don’t want him to run again. And the last thing the country appears to want is a Biden rematch with the 45th president, who’s the current frontrunner in the nascent Republican primary race.
But Trump’s strength inside the GOP forms the core rationale for Biden’s campaign. The incumbent reasons that he’s the best bet Democrats have to prevent his predecessor from winning a second term that would surely be even more wild than the first.
Biden is beginning his final campaign after a lifetime in politics from a familiar position of low expectations. But he’s repeatedly defied conventional political wisdom and connected with swing voters by standing as the antidote to Republican extremism. Paradoxically, even though much of his party seems to wish it had an alternative, Biden appears sufficiently strong to ward off the emergence of any significant primary challengers.
The president ignited his reelection bid with the release of a campaign video on Tuesday – four years to the day after launching what was then seen as a long-shot effort to fulfill a White House dream first kindled by an unsuccessful race for the 1988 Democratic nomination.
“When I ran for president four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are,” he said in the video, which opened with images of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and abortion rights activists protesting at the US Supreme Court.
Biden’s video made clear that he will run less on his record in office than against Republican “MAGA extremism” which he cast as a grave threat to democracy and abortion rights. The video showed Trump and his possibly most threatening rival in the GOP primary race, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, together, portraying them as twin leaders in Republican radicalism. It also spotlighted far-right Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Biden vowed to continue to fight to secure American democratic and personal freedoms and Social Security retirement benefits.
“That’s been the work of my first term – to fight for our democracy,” Biden said, warning that now was not a time to be complacent.
The Republican National Committee issued its own video in response, portraying a futuristic vision of a world and a nation in chaos in a Biden second term, beset by war, a border crisis, rampant crime and a financial collapse at home. The video ended with the words “Who’s in charge here? It feels like the train is coming off the tracks.”
Amazingly, the same motivation that underwrote Biden’s 2020 White House run – Trump’s threat to US democratic institutions and values – will be the foundation of his reelection bid. Biden, in the shadow boxing of an unannounced 2024 bid, has fulminated against “MAGA extremism” and anchored a surprising Democratic showing in the 2022 midterms on the same theme.
Reasons why America may not want Biden or Trump
It will be months before the first votes are cast in the Republican primary. And it’s more than 18 months before Americans pick their next president. Events yet to occur in the US and abroad could transform the race. Unexpected turns in the lives and careers of both Biden and Trump – and the handful of other candidates vying for the GOP nomination – could change everything. And recent elections have shown that punditry and polling don’t always capture surprising results.
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Yet circumstances are conjuring a unique presidential race that reflects the country’s polarized, unsettled state and will likely again challenge political institutions and American unity.
This is a nation that often leverages elections to empower a new generation. But it’s now contemplating the possibility of a race between an incumbent who would be 86 by the end of his second term and a challenger who would be 82 at the same point. The oldest combined matchup in US presidential history would probably be welcome for Biden since the optics of a match-up against a younger challenger – for instance, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is yet to launch a primary bid – could alter the feel of the race.
In an even more remarkable twist, Trump is seeking to pull off a feat accomplished only once before in US history – by Grover Cleveland, who served non consecutive terms after he won a return to office in 1892.
Trump’s political longevity is another anomaly in 2024.
Presidents defeated after only a single term usually fade into retirement and don’t return to challenge their vanquisher. But Trump is still the most dominant figure in a Republican Party he ripped from its corporate foundations and turned into a populist vessel for conservative culture wars. Even more incredibly, Trump is attempting a return after leaving office in disgrace after being twice impeached for abusing power. He then refused to accept the will of voters in 2020 and incited an insurrection in a bid to cling to power.
Two weeks after Trump’s mob stormed Congress, Biden told Americans in his inaugural address, “We have learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile, at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”
But the fact that Biden is entering his reelection campaign again warning that democracy is under threat reflects the reality of a nation caught in an existential struggle over its institutions and still reeling under the influence of the most turbulent presidency – and ex-presidency – in history.
If anything, Trump’s threat to democracy has only increased – a factor that will play into Biden’s campaign. He is promising to flush out the professional civil service in Washington and to gut the Justice Department, which he claims is subjecting him to a political persecution.
In his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, last month, Trump warned, “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”
Vowing to purge “thugs and criminals” in the judicial system, he added, chillingly: “I am your warrior. I am your justice.”
Biden could face a rival under multiple indictments
Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric points to another extraordinary dimension of the 2024 race that Biden is expected to officially join on Tuesday.
The former president’s claims of political persecution are rooted in the multiple legal threats that make his candidacy like none before it. Trump is facing the real threat of criminal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 election and, separately, over his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
On Monday, Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, said she would announce this summer whether she would charge Trump and associates over their bid to overturn his loss in the Peach State in 2020. Already, Trump has been criminally charged in Manhattan in relation to a hush money payment to an adult film star before the 2016 election. Trump has pleaded not guilty in New York and maintains he hasn’t done anything wrong in any of the cases against him.
While Trump appears to have seen a short-term political boost from the Manhattan indictment, there is no precedent for a presidential candidate facing multiple and simultaneous criminal investigations, and it is possible that such a scenario could play into the hands of a candidate like DeSantis, who is promising to implement a Trump-style agenda without the unhinged distractions that typically swirl around the ex-president.
At this point, however, no potential GOP rival has managed or dared to weaponize Trump’s legal woes for political gain – a factor that adds to the belief of many Democrats that he’ll win the GOP nomination.
Biden cannot just rely on the fact he isn’t Trump
In pictures: President Joe Biden
Biden defined his 2020 campaign, his presidency and the build-up to his reelection bid by who he is not – Trump. He often quips when talking about his political campaigns, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” But this will not be sufficient as he seeks a second term. Biden will have to defend his presidency and convince voters that they are better off than when he took over amid the political fire and fury of Trump’s exit.
He will never escape questions over his age. Any signs of unsteadiness or tiredness will prompt Republicans to argue he should be retired. Serving as president while running for president has defeated younger men. And this race figures to be more grueling than the last one he ran, when the Covid-19 pandemic all but suspended normal campaigning.
But Biden’s faith in the power of comparisons could help him. Trump, after all, would turn 80 during a second term. And the president will argue Americans can’t afford the chaos that reigned the last time Trump was in the White House. He can point to a huge bipartisan infrastructure bill that the White House says is triggering an industrial rebirth in the Midwest. Unemployment has been consistently near record lows while Biden has been in office, although the highest inflation in 40 years – which has now significantly moderated but which the president downplayed – convinced many Americans that they were locked in a prolonged economic crisis. High gas prices last year had a similar effect. And any downturn next year could be disastrous for the president’s hopes and play into Trump’s selective claims that the country experienced a golden age when he was in charge.
As Biden claims to have defended democracy at home, he is also sure to compare his revival of the Western alliance in defense of Ukraine to Trump’s continuing hero worship of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Democrats will also seek to exploit the overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion by a conservative Supreme Court majority built by Trump and the continuing conservative drive to eradicate the procedure entirely. Concern among some moderate Republicans suggests that Biden may find a rich political seam on the issue, which has already galvanized voters in elections since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer.
Ultimately, the president knows his fate will come down to the same swing states that put him in office with narrow margins – including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Democrats will put their faith in the evidence of the last three national elections, which showed the ex-president was disastrous for GOP hopes in many of the most competitive states.
So while Biden will have to run on his record like any other incumbent, he’s sure to anchor his campaign around Trump.
In a speech in Maryland this month, Biden mentioned MAGA – his pejorative code word for Trump Republicans – more than 20 times.
It was a clear sign. Even if Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, Biden still plans to run against him.
