Major, major news is that Joe Biden told Al Sharpton he’s going to do it again, understood to mean that Joe Biden is running for reelection for President in 2024. 

This is per Al Sharpton, who says Biden said it to me when I saw him at a White House event. 

Very interesting development. There have been questions as to whether Joe Biden is going to run for re-election in 2024. One of the main reasons why there have been questions are Joe Biden’s age. Joe Biden, at this exact time is 79 years old. He will be 80 in November, shortly after the 2022 midterms. He will be almost 82 at the time of the 2024 presidential election, and he would be 86 at the time that the next president would take over in January of 2029. 

So there have been questions as to whether Joe Biden plans to run. The bigger reason may be why I have been questioning whether Joe Biden actually plans to run for re-election is that his approval rating had been quite low. In fact, if you look back, for example, at the 538 Biden approval average, and you look back just a few months, you see that there was a point in roughly late July where Joe Biden’s approval was down into the 37s. And it was historically low compared to prior presidents at that point in their presidency. 

Since then, Joe Biden’s approval has recovered to about 43 and has basically sat there. And while 43 as a grade on a paper, we wouldn’t consider it particularly good, Forty-three doesn’t sound that high. It’s actually quite normal in this hyper-polarized modern political era. So with 43% and some significant legislative accomplishments behind Joe Biden, the Pact Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and long list of things we’ve talked about on the podcast, it started to become significantly more plausible that maybe Joe Biden would have a shot in terms of running for reelection. 

Now, do I think that this is a guarantee that Biden is running again? I don’t. Right now, what we have is a statement allegedly made to Al Sharpton, and then reported back. But it is seeming more plausible today than at any point in the last year that indeed, Joe Biden would run for re-election. 

Now for Democrats, it’s a two-part question in the sense of, is there a better shot at winning in ’24 with an incumbent president or with someone new? Historically, the incumbent has the better shot. Incumbents tend to get reelected. On the other side of that, if it’s a rematch of Trump and Biden, there are important statistical reasons to be worried about how it’s going to go. Now, that doesn’t mean Biden loses necessarily. But I do believe that a Trump-Biden rematch would be very tough for Joe Biden. 

Could he win? Absolutely. But it’s different to be Joe Biden running to get us back to normality after four insane years of Trump. That’s one thing versus running against Trump again, when you are the incumbent, with even a historically typical, but not particularly good 43% approval rating. And I think that that would be a very uphill battle. Now, I’m not ready yet to look state by state. And if we looked state by state, we might start saying well, okay, I mean, if Trump just edged out in Georgia, and then Pennsylvania, I mean, that’s it, you know. I get the mathematical electoral scenarios, this is less about that.

It is more about part of what helped Biden in 2020 was Biden is the epitome of the, quote, “normal politician.” He’s been around Washington a long time. He has what we call political experience. He understands diplomacy and foreign relations and just kind of how presidents should behave. 

And part of it was even if you didn’t love every policy of Joe Biden, even if you didn’t believe all the things that he claimed he was going to do, he was going to try to do and I didn’t to a great degree, there was a sense among many voters that Biden was just what the country needed at that particular point in time. After four okay years of Biden with a 43% approval rating, that feeling isn’t going to be a factor anymore. 

And if it’s Trump, it’ll be an uphill battle. If Trump were to run but lose the Republican primary to Ron DeSantis, that would be an uphill battle. And that’s where the question comes about is that is the Democratic Party better off with someone younger, with someone who has not run before?  Gavin Newsom is a name that’s being talked about. Pete Buttigieg in some circles is being discussed. Jamie Raskin I think is a super interesting candidate. Okay, etc. The specifics don’t matter. But is it better not to have Biden rematch Donald Trump? And I think that there’s an interesting question there.

So we will see the the claim from Al Sharpton is Biden told me he’s running. It won’t be that long until we know the answer to that question.