Joe Biden was relishing the moment on Friday evening, when, to a cheering crowd of Democrats at a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, he listed some of the highlights of his presidency.
On the midterm elections: “A giant red wave? Well, guess what? It never happened.” About the economy: “We created more new jobs in two years than any president did in their entire term.” And internationally: “America is back, and we’re leading the world again, we are.”
But insisting there was “a lot more to do”, he challenged an audience that had been holding up “Joe” and “Kamala” signs throughout the evening to keep supporting him. “Let me ask you a simple question. Are you with me?” Biden said. They responded with the classic chant for a president running for re-election: “Four more years! Four more years!”
Because of his age — Biden turned 80 in November — and his underwhelming approval ratings, the president gave the impression for much of last year that he was floundering. Biden faced persistent doubts about whether he would, or rather should, seek a second term, with some Democrats calling for fresh leadership.
But the mood in the party is now completely different. A stronger-than-expected performance by Democrats in last year’s midterm elections — historically regarded as a referendum on the incumbent administration — have hushed many of those misgivings, and put Biden in a much stronger position to launch another general election campaign.
The choreography of the Philadelphia speech already had all of the elements of a re-election rally. Biden has the perfect platform to reinforce the case when he makes his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Data showing the US economy gained an astonishing 517,000 jobs last month and an unemployment rate (3.4 per cent) at its lowest level since 1969 will certainly help as Biden makes the opening argument to Americans about why he deserves a second chance in the White House. His pitch is expected to rest as much on his record in office as it will on the dysfunction within a Republican party that, in many respects, is still in thrall to Donald Trump.
“Biden has weathered a lot of storms: it’s pretty clear the pandemic is coming to an end, we have best job growth in decades, inflation may be creeping down, and his control of the situation in Ukraine has been no less than masterful,” says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Washington think-tank, and a former Clinton administration official. “Does he go bounding up the stage? No! But who the hell cares?”
‘Level-headed choice’
A formal re-election announcement from Biden could still take weeks or even months after the joint address to Congress. Until then, the president still has time to change his mind. However most White House officials and Democrats in Washington expect him to declare his candidacy and face no major challenge.
“As I did in 1988, and 2008 and 2020, I look forward to being on your side when you run for president in 2024,” outgoing White House chief of staff Ron Klain said to Biden last week.
Patrick Gaspard, the president of the centre-left think-tank the Center for American Progress, adds: “Democrats feel pretty darn good about their standard bearer, and I don’t hear much of a conversation of ‘Should he or shouldn’t he?’”
Gaspard also expects Kamala Harris to join Biden on the ticket again as vice-president, despite her own lagging approval ratings. “Biden and Harris are a team joined at the hip from day one ,” Gaspard says. In Philadelphia, Biden gave a shout-out to Harris — “She’s a great vice-president.” She had spoken just before Biden. “We are delivering, big time,” she insisted.
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There are some early indicators that it could pay off for Democrats to rally round Biden, such as an improvement in his polling data in recent months. In July, more than 57 per cent of Americans disapproved of Biden’s performance as president, compared to 37 who approved of it. That 20-point gap has been cut down to 8.5 points, with 52.3 per cent of Americans disapproving and 43.8 per cent approving of the way Biden is handling the job.
Much of that rebound has been the result of the passage of key legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act, which included subsidies for clean energy and measures to cut prescription drug costs, as well as the Biden administration’s stance in defence of abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Roe vs Wade precedent. The increase in his popularity has also coincided with a drop in petrol prices and an easing of inflation overall.
Biden’s momentum, however, appears to have ebbed after the justice department last month appointed a special counsel to examine his handling of classified documents found at his private home in Delaware and a private office he used at a Washington think-tank. The case is a gift to Republicans who can use it to attack Biden’s integrity and will also make it harder for Biden to blast Trump for his hoarding of sensitive government material at Mar-a-Lago in a potential rematch.
Many Americans remain disenchanted, and some even angry, with Biden because inflation remains high despite recent declines: the consumer price index rose by 6.5 per cent in December. Other issues including immigration and crime are also weighing on the president, meaning that he remains a vulnerable incumbent.
“President Biden [started] year three of his presidency with the nation in a prolonged, sour mood, with a weak job [approval] rating, and with a majority of the country giving him poor marks for being able to unite the country or having the necessary mental and physical health to be president,” says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the widely followed NBC News poll.
With ratings well below the 50 per cent level during his first few months in office until August 2021, it remains an even bet whether Biden is destined to be a one-term president like Trump, George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter, or is primed to follow in the footsteps of more politically successful two-term predecessors like Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Much will depend on who surfaces on the Republican side, say political analysts and pollsters.
“Against Trump, Biden would be a very slight favourite, as the election would probably turn on attitudes towards Trump as much as towards Biden,” says Charlie Cook, of the non-partisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. “Against any other Republican, Biden would be, at best, a slight underdog.”
So far, only Trump has announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, while Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the UN, has signalled she will soon join the race. Other likely candidates, such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are still waiting on the sidelines.
“If you put him up against [Trump], Biden is still seen as the far more level-headed choice to be president,” adds Jay Campbell, a pollster at Hart Research, the Democratic polling firm. “Against a more reasonable and palatable Republican, I don’t have a good answer for that, I don’t think anybody does.”
Changing gears
With Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives at the start of the year, albeit with a very slim majority, Biden has already shown signs of shifting from executing his sweeping agenda to defending and promoting what he accomplished in the first two years.
“When America sees these projects popping up across the country, it sends a really important message: when we work together, there’s not a damn thing we can’t do,” Biden said at a railway station in Baltimore last week as he spoke about the impact of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
Although Biden’s approval ratings on the economy are still significantly negative, his aides hope that the billions of dollars of subsidies for clean energy, advanced manufacturing and chip plants are unleashing an industrial renaissance that will begin to resonate with voters as they see the economic benefits. After the State of the Union speech, Biden will travel to Madison, Wisconsin, to argue that his agenda would bring “good-paying, union jobs” to the country.
But political strategists say Biden needs to do a better job as a political salesman — even within his party. Unlike the 2020 campaign, which was waged during the height of the pandemic, the next presidential election is expected to be more traditional, requiring more public and arguably more inspirational appearances. An ABC-Washington Post poll released on Sunday showed that 58 per cent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents would prefer a different nominee.
“When you have recently turned 80, and you’re already the oldest president in American history, people don’t instinctively connect you with the word ‘future’,” David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief political strategist, wrote on CNN.com last week.
“Rather than merely claiming credit for what he’s done, Biden desperately needs to tell a larger story about where we’re going and paint a picture of how these major initiatives are laying the groundwork for something better.”
One of Biden’s greatest assets is that he is presiding over a Democratic party that is more united than it has been since before the 2016 presidential primary election that pitted Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton. Despite wrenching arguments and delays in late 2021 between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party over the size and details of the climate, health and tax bill, there is less overt tension and far more common ground between the factions which could help the president as he prepares a presidential bid.
Jeff Zients, who will replace Klain as chief of staff, has more managerial skills than political skills, and is considered to be more aligned with the business-friendly moderate Democrats. “I do think in the first two years they were very very worried with their left flank and that’s probably less of a concern right now,” says Kamarck, of Brookings.
But even after a successful policy run that checked off many of the priorities of all wings of the party, Biden is still facing some scepticism that he can win back non-college educated working class voters who have been drifting towards Republicans in recent years.
“To just get in the door with many working-class voters and have them consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince these voters that they are not looked down on, their concerns are taken seriously and their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened,” Ruy Teixeira, an author and Democratic commentator, wrote in the Democratic Strategist newsletter last week.
The biggest danger for Biden may well be that of a recession hitting exactly as the campaign season moves into full gear. “We saw so much inflation, and the very acute concerns about the state of the economy still exist right now. Are we going into recession, and if so how bad is it going to be?” says Kevin Madden, a senior partner at Penta, a consultancy in Washington, and former senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
So far, though, the economy is holding up. The latest IMF forecast issued last week projected that the US economy will grow at a rate of 1.4 per cent this year, and 1 per cent in 2024, which would be consistent with a soft landing.
Meanwhile, the economic team at the White House has grown increasingly confident that inflation has turned a corner. But if that outlook for both the labour market and inflation takes a turn for the worse over the course of the year, it could spell trouble.
Similarly, Biden’s response to the war in Ukraine will have helped restore faith in his leadership on foreign policy and national security issues, after the chaotic and deadly military pullout from Afghanistan. But if Russia makes unexpected gains on the battlefield, despite the billions of dollars in military and financial aid to Kyiv, it could be damaging to the White House. The dispute this weekend about the shooting down of a Chinese balloon over US airspace underlined how a crisis between Washington and Beijing could upend his presidency.
Biden seems assured that he can win any stand-off with Republicans over increasing the debt ceiling and avoiding a potentially devastating default for the economy and financial markets. In the past, Democratic presidents including Clinton and Obama prevailed in similar fiscal showdowns in Congress, largely because they were judged to be more responsible. The struggles of Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Speaker, to control the most extreme rank-and-file lawmakers, many of whom have embraced election denialism and may be willing to push the US off the financial cliff, may well be Biden’s most potent political foil heading into 2024.
“If in fact there is a default, history suggests that Republicans might come out of that a bit weaker, but these things are unpredictable,” says Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Battle of ideas
Last month, Biden travelled to Atlanta to become the first sitting president to deliver the Sunday sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual base of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The visit was seen as part of his effort to maintain and shore up support among African-American voters, a key group in his political coalition. “Progress is never easy, but redeeming the soul of the country is absolutely essential,” Biden told the crowd.
Such words reflect Biden’s sense of his own enduring political mission, which is to defeat Trumpian extremism in America and authoritarianism, as much as possible, around the world. It is a platform that inspired him to plan a run for the White House starting in 2017 after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and served him and the Democrats well in 2020 and 2022. He has reprised this theme frequently in the early weeks of this year.
“Every single day the Biden presidency is advantaged by the comparison with the swirl of constant, daily turmoil that is the world of Donald Trump,” adds Gaspard, of the Center for American Progress. “He benefits from the fact that elections are actually contests between figures and ideas.”
But Biden and his top aides will be aware that their success or failure cannot solely depend on Republican infighting. His personal appeal, as well as that of his policies, will have to gain traction in their own right. After the booming jobs number for January was reported on Friday, bringing the total of employment created under his watch to 12.1mn, Biden seemed convinced that he was on track.
“For the past two years, we’ve heard a chorus of critics write off my economic plan . . they said we can’t bring back American manufacturing and they said we can’t make things in America, and . . . the only way to slow down inflation was to destroy jobs,” he said on Friday. “Today’s data makes crystal clear what I’ve always known in my gut — these critics and cynics are wrong.”