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America got one step closer to the presidential rematch almost no one wants when President Biden launched his re-election bid Tuesday morning. "This is not a time to be complacent," he said in a perky three-minute video. "That's why I'm running for reelection." And while the president is unlikely to draw a serious challenger in the primaries, nominating an unpopular octogenarian is a potentially catastrophic risk for Democrats, and for the country. If he stumbles, we will all pay the price of four years of reactionary Republican governance that could entrench minority rule forever.
Many of the advantages Biden enjoyed in 2020 are long gone. The campaign took place during the worst of the pre-vaccine COVID-19 pandemic, allowing Biden to maintain a light travel schedule by necessity and to create a tightly controlled media relations operation that would have raised many more eyebrows in normal times. Unlike Trump, he did not crisscross the country holding massive rallies. And Trump cannot serve as the same kind of foil for Biden's vague politics of decency this time around, because while he continues to linger in our politics like a bad cold, he's not actually in office.
There is also no guarantee that Biden will face Trump at all. The former president might be in jail or could very well be defeated in the Republican nominating contests. Especially in 2020, Trump was one of the weakest and least popular major party candidates in modern history, whose insane debate performances only reinforced a weary public's perception that he simply couldn't be trusted to pilot the United States through the remainder of the pandemic. Even so, Trump came within 44,000 votes spread across three critical states of forcing a 269-269 Electoral College tie that would have been resolved in his favor in the House of Representatives.
So Biden did not, in fact, 'beat him like a drum' as he had promised. And if he faces someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, he could really be in trouble. DeSantis led or tied Biden in many publicly available polls in April of this year, whereas Trump mostly trails the president. And if Republican primary voters could manage to nominate someone without Trump's cargo plane worth of baggage or DeSantis' off-putting history of extremist culture war antics, like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Biden could easily be the underdog.
It's not hard to see why. A late March 2023 Monmouth University poll found that just 25 percent of Democrats wanted to see Biden seek a second term. The odds are long against perceptions changing much in the interim with Biden's legislative agenda DOA now that the House is in Republican hands until 2025. That lack of base enthusiasm could haunt the president in the general election, especially if he's running against someone who doesn't goose Democratic turnout by virtue of his being Trump.
There is also the issue of Biden's age, and the potential for an unpleasant October surprise. Mortality rates for his age bracket are almost five times higher than for 55-64 year-olds, and more than 10 times as high as for someone like Barack Obama, who was 47 when he stood for election in 2008. If Biden dies or becomes incapacitated after he is nominated, Democrats will be in quite a pickle. Party rules give the DNC the right to pick a new nominee. But especially if it happens after ballot deadlines have passed, Democrats will, for all practical purposes, be stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris, whose approval ratings are—fairly or unfairly—cataclysmic and who polls much worse against Trump in head-to-head matchups. One recent Harvard/Harris poll had the former president dusting the vice president by 10 points.
At least he won't have to worry about the presidential debates. In a fit of Trump-driven pique, the Republican National Committee withdrew from the Commission on Presidential Debates last April, claiming that its rules and practices are biased against GOP candidates. If Republicans stubbornly refuse to allow their nominee to debate, it will at least spare Democrats the nerve-wracking experience of watching an 81-year-old President Biden cooking under the lights of national TV for two hours.
Nevertheless, it's hard to see how Democrats wouldn't be better off with a newer, younger face, someone without Biden's vulnerabilities and who could campaign more vigorously and enthusiastically than the effort Biden is likely to be able to muster at his age. Recently re-elected Democratic governors like Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois' J.B. Pritzker and Colorado's Jared Polis are part of a refreshingly deep party bench of potential presidential nominees that also includes newly elected state executives like Maryland's Wes Moore and Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro. All of them would be much more likely to inspire the kind of youth and minority turnout that will be critical to a 2024 Democratic victory.
As long as the Republican Party remains in the grip of anti-democratic figures like Trump, the stakes of every presidential election are extremely high. If Biden drags the whole party down with him, we could be looking at a Republican governing trifecta that would pass a national abortion ban and force its hateful anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ agenda onto blue states. Republicans would have years to turn the country into a supersized version of Tennessee or Texas, where state Republicans have broken almost completely with the idea of representative democracy as we understand it.
Those are the stakes of the big, risky bet that Biden is making on himself. Let us hope the odds remain ever in his favor.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
