President Joe Biden delivers remarks to service members, first responders, and their families on the 22nd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
By some measures, Joe Biden should be in the pole position for re-election. The U.S. President’s key policies, from building infrastructure to protecting abortion access, have the support of a solid majority of voters. The country’s economy is growing, with unemployment and inflation relatively low. And his likely opponent is facing 91 charges in four coming criminal trials.
But Mr. Biden is perpetually mired in negative approval ratings, with Americans who take a dim view of his performance outnumbering those who give the President a thumbs up. The vast majority of his Democratic Party’s voters would rather someone else be their candidate for 2024. And polling shows him roughly tied with former president Donald Trump in a prospective rematch.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Biden on Tuesday in a bid to connect him to the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden. So far, there has been no evidence the President used his power to help his son make money, but the proceedings could deflect public attention from Mr. Trump’s legal travails.
Despite it all, Mr. Biden is on a glide path to claim his party’s nomination without serious opposition, setting the stage for a highly unusual election in which the Democrats will try to take on a candidate accused of sweeping criminality with one who inspires widespread ambivalence.
There are a few reasons, observers say, for this state of affairs. One is Mr. Biden’s age. Another is his history as a compromise candidate without much of a political base. And then there is the increasing political polarization of the United States.
The President himself seems to see age as his greatest weakness. At times he tries to defuse it with a joke – he refers to president James Madison, who governed more than 200 years ago, as his “good friend Jimmy,” for instance. At others he argues it is actually a strength. “I come to the job with more experience than any president in American history,” he told the Irish parliament last spring.
A poll by the Associated Press last month found a staggering 77 per cent of voters saw Mr. Biden as too old to remain in office for another term. A CNN poll found two-thirds of Democratic respondents wanted someone other than Mr. Biden as the nominee, even though eight out of 10 of them had no specific alternative candidate in mind.
At 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest-ever president. If re-elected, he would be 86 at the end of his second term. The previous record holder, Ronald Reagan, was 77 when he left office. Mr. Trump would be 82. Age-related health problems have received heightened scrutiny in Washington this summer, amid persistent questions on Capitol Hill about the mental acuity of 90-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Mitch McConnell, 81, the Republican leader in the Senate.
With Mr. Biden, concerns have centred on a handful of public slips and falls and a penchant for strange, sometimes rambling comments. “God save the Queen, man,” he said at the end of a speech on gun control in June. This past weekend, at a news conference in Vietnam, he embarked on a lengthy recounting of the plot of a western to make a point about climate change.
Still, it can be difficult to untangle signs of age from signs of Mr. Biden simply being Mr. Biden. The President famously overcame a childhood stutter and has talked about his struggles with public speaking. He has a long history of making bizarre quips; during his time as vice-president, his hot-mic moments sometimes became the subjects of humorous cable-news highlight reels.
The President has also never cut a particularly exciting figure. In 2020 he ran as an inoffensive, avuncular conciliator who could restore calm to the White House after four chaotic years of Mr. Trump.
“His superpower is compromise and knowing the system in Washington. And that’s also his weakness, because people have such a negative view of Washington,” said Barbara Ann Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia.
In similar historical situations of presidential unpopularity, incumbents have typically faced serious challenges to their renomination. This happened with Lyndon Johnson in 1968, for instance, and Jimmy Carter in 1980. Mr. Biden, by contrast, looks set to be renominated without difficulty. His only challengers are anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. and self-help author Marianne Williamson.
It has helped Mr. Biden that other Democratic presidential hopefuls, such as Vice-President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom, have either failed to catch fire or declined to run for fear of dividing the party.
Age a bigger problem for Biden
Do you think each of the following is too old to effectively serve
another four-year term as president?
Yes
No
Joe Biden
Overall
77%
22%
Democrats
69%
30%
Repub.
89%
11%
Donald Trump
Overall
51%
49%
Democrats
71%
29%
Repub.
28%
72%
the globe and mail, Source: AP-NORC Poll conducted
August 10-14, 2023 with 1,165 adults across the u.s..
Age a bigger problem for Biden
Do you think each of the following is too old to effectively serve
another four-year term as president?
Yes
No
Joe Biden
Overall
77%
22%
Democrats
69%
30%
Repub.
89%
11%
Donald Trump
Overall
51%
49%
Democrats
71%
29%
Repub.
28%
72%
the globe and mail, Source: AP-NORC Poll conducted
August 10-14, 2023 with 1,165 adults across the u.s..
Age a bigger problem for Biden
Do you think each of the following is too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president?
Yes
No
Joe Biden
Overall
77%
22%
Democrats
69%
30%
Republicans
89%
11%
Donald Trump
Overall
51%
49%
Democrats
71%
29%
Republicans
28%
72%
the globe and mail, Source: AP-NORC Poll conducted
August 10-14, 2023 with 1,165 adults across the u.s..
The President has also bucked speculation at the start of his term that he would be little more than a transitional figure. Instead, he pushed through major legislation on infrastructure, climate change and manufacturing and led an international coalition in helping Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who advised Bernie Sanders’s two runs for the nomination, said Mr. Biden’s effectiveness in office has helped inoculate him against internal party challenges.
“You can say you want to get rid of him because he’s too old or he’s not exciting, but you can’t argue against what he’s done. And running a campaign based on ‘he’s too old’ doesn’t work,” said Mr. Rocha of Solidarity Strategies.
One wild card could be the emergence of a third-party candidate. Leftist author and activist Cornel West is running for the Green Party nomination, while No Labels, a centrist group, has been trying to recruit a conservative Democrat or moderate Republican to launch a bid.
“Besides giving directly to Donald Trump’s campaign, the best thing you can do to elect Trump is support No Labels, RFK Jr., Cornel West or Marianne Williamson,” Jim Messina, a Democratic consultant who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, warned in a presentation to clients published by Politico.
Another unknown is the effect of the soap opera surrounding Hunter Biden. Prosecutors have signalled they will soon lay criminal charges against him for illegally buying a gun, setting the stage for an election-year trial at a time when his father is calling for tougher gun-safety laws.
The impeachment inquiry, whether or not it uncovers any wrongdoing by the President, will also help Mr. Trump tarnish Mr. Biden on the campaign trail. “These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption,” Mr. McCarthy, a staunch ally of the former president’s, said on Tuesday.
It could be that unpopularity is in part a new normal for U.S. politics. Mr. Trump, for instance, never notched a net-positive approval rating during his entire term and stands accused of trying to overthrow democracy itself by reversing his 2020 election loss. But this hasn’t stopped him amassing a 40-percentage-point lead in Republican primary polls.
One of his primary opponents, Nikki Haley, has campaigned on administering mental-acuity tests to political candidates 75 and older. But her campaign is stuck in the single digits.
To Mr. Rocha, it’s a sign of how increasingly immovable voters are. Relentless attack ads play a part, too, he said, while the fragmenting of media audiences makes it more difficult to reach voters. “We’re more polarized than I’ve ever seen in my 30-year political history,” he said. “It’s harder to get your message out.”