Joe Biden will not raise waves of enthusiasm when this Tuesday – if he complies with 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 elections, according to two polls carried out in mid-April by NBC. News and the AP agency.
The rejection of the president's candidacy fits with the low approval rating that his performance continues to reap since the disaster of the evacuation of troops in Afghanistan in August 2021, at which time support dropped below 50% and has never exceeded it again. that threshold. Now, according to the FiveThirtyEight poll compilation, the approval rate is 42.3%, which is a pyrrhic improvement from 38% last July. “Joe Biden is winning the 2024 unpopularity contest,” political scientist Philip Bump commented yesterday in The Washington Post.
Among Democrats, the reluctance to run for their boss does not mean that between 88% and 81% of them say they will vote for him if he runs. Do you see it as a lesser evil? It can, but they rather see it as the only option. Because to date no important party figure has taken a step to challenge him in the primaries prior to the appointment of November 5, 2024. For now, only the eccentric anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, son of Bobby Kennedy, as well as the author of self-help books Marianne Williamson, have advanced that they will attend the blue party primaries.
The obvious advantage of competing from the White House itself, the fact that Biden is the only politician who has shown himself capable of beating Donald Trump and the good results of the mid-term legislative elections, where the Democrats retained the majority in the Senate and narrowly lost the House of Representatives, are the factors that may have held back the president's potential rivals: potential contenders who have always been cited as an alternative in the event that Biden did not appear, anyway, And that is the case of both Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, both his rivals in 2020, as well as that of the mighty California governor, Gavin Newsom.
Among the almost three-quarters of respondents who reject Joe 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 his 82nd birthday when voters go to the polls in 2024. And, therefore, he would be 86 when his second and final term ends in January 2029.
As for Trump, the best placed among the declared and potential candidates of the conservative camp, 60% of Americans as a whole and a third of Republicans believe that the former president should not run in 2024.
The conclusion is bleak: today everything indicates that the citizens of the polarized Western superpower will reluctantly turn out to vote in the next presidential elections, since the majority rejects the two most likely candidates for the final contest. A penalty of elections, if the panorama does not change.
