AMAC Exclusive
Washington’s worst kept secret is the assumption, correct or not, that President Joe Biden will not seek reelection in 2024. Apparently, the majority of the American public was let in on the secret, too. According to new polling released by Quinnipiac University, a majority of Americans, 54 percent, believe Biden will not run for president again.
At 78 years old, President Biden was already the oldest person ever to be elected President. If he were to run again and win, he would be 82 at the time of his second inauguration. According to findings in the same Quinnipiac poll, nearly half of Americans, 48 percent, believe it’s bad for the country if Biden runs for president in 2024, while only 37 percent believe it would be good for the country if Biden ran again.
Biden himself seems uncertain if he will run – or if he will physically be able to. At his first news conference as president back in March, Biden said he planned to seek reelection in 2024. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation,” Biden told reporters at the time. However, he later followed up and clarified that his decision was not set in stone when a reporter pressed him to answer more definitively on his reelection plans. “I said, ‘that is my expectation’… I’m a great respecter of fate. I’ve never been able to plan four-and-a-half, three-and-a-half years ahead for certain.”
While it is not exactly clear what Biden means when he says he “respects fate,” his statements nonetheless highlight the uncertainty of his political future. If Biden ultimately opts not to seek reelection as so many assume, he will be the first president since Lyndon Johnson to voluntarily become a one-term president.
But Biden has surprised people before. By conventional wisdom, he was never supposed to be in this position to begin with. After two disastrous past presidential runs in 1988 and 2008 and declining to run in 2016, insiders assumed that Joe Biden’s political career was dead.
Even when Biden ran in 2020, it was widely assumed he would not win, as his campaign repeatedly look dead. Normally, a former Vice President might be expected to discourage most challengers from entering the race. But nearly 30 other Democrat candidates ran to oppose Biden. Even the President he had served loyally under for 8 years in the White House tried to convince him multiple times not to run. “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Obama reportedly told Biden in the spring of 2019 before he announced.
Biden went on to get shellacked in the Iowa caucuses in a horrible fourth place finish. He slipped further in New Hampshire when he came in a shocking fifth place. And after suffering a runner-up finish to Bernie Sanders in Nevada, it looked like his campaign was over. That was until the Democrat political machine went into full panic mode and realized that socialist Bernie Sanders was about to be on a runaway train to the party’s nomination if they didn’t step in and stop him.
The rest is history. Biden won the next primary in South Carolina thanks to strong support among African-American voters and a key endorsement from his old friend Jim Clyburn, and then all of the pieces fell into place—just barely. Nearly every Democrat candidate in the race subsequently ended their campaigns and endorsed Biden to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination – the plan apparently worked just like the Democrat party establishment drew it up.
Of course, Biden would eventually go on to become president, although the election remains a fraught issue to this day. 42,918 votes spread across the battleground states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia were the difference between Electoral College victory and defeat for Joe Biden in the official tally. For comparison, Biden’s 2020 vote margin is smaller than the 77,774 votes spread across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016 that propelled Donald Trump to the White House four years earlier.
The reality is that despite a once-in-a-generation pandemic that shut off the world’s strongest economy, widespread protests and riots spurred on by left-wing activists not seen in a generation, and the unprecedented advocacy of the mainstream media and Big Tech reporting outright lies to help defeat the incumbent president, Joe Biden officially still only managed to eek out one of the closest victories in the history of the American presidency – not to mention Democrats lost seats in the House and only secured a 50-50 split in the Senate. That means Biden was sworn in not with a clear mandate, but by way of a very ambivalent electorate and in a clear position of vulnerability.
Nevertheless, President Biden has proceeded to ignore the warning signs over his first eight months in office and has governed more radically than any administration in recent history. The political consequences for President Biden’s defiance of voters’ wishes are beginning to emerge.
Last week marked President Biden’s lowest approval rating of his presidency in the RealClearPolitics average. Trillions of dollars in new spending has given way to rising inflation, which threatens the economic stability of American families. A complete reversal of the Trump administration’s immigration policies has resulted in an open southern border and a catastrophic migration crisis. According to Customs and Border Protection figures released last month, Border Patrol agents have made more than a million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year, surpassing any full-year total going back to at least 2005. And despite being handed three vaccines by his predecessor to massively aid him in accomplishing his promise to “defeat the virus,” it now appears America is regressing with regard to the COVID pandemic. Mask mandates are being imposed again across the country, and what was supposed to be a historic economic recovery is in jeopardy.
If Biden continues to pursue the radical left’s unpopular agenda and history repeats itself with devastating midterm losses for his party in Congress, don’t be surprised if the President takes an exit ramp ahead of 2024. After all, most Americans already expect it.