Biden will be 81 years old for most of the campaign. The ubiquitous presence of elderly Democrats in the party leadership has inured people to how unusual it is for someone of that age to run for the presidency, not just in the United States but for important national leadership positions anywhere. Biden will be older during the campaign than Ronald Reagan was when he left office, older than Nancy Pelosi was when she began her last term as Speaker of the House, older than an ailing Winston Churchill was when he resigned from his last stint as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1955.
His only company in the 80-plus executive category right now are autocrats like Cameroon’s 89-year-old Paul Biya and Iran’s 83-year-old Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. In general, the need to keep someone old enough to have great-grandchildren in power is a sign of rampant political dysfunction, anxiety that the regime itself would collapse if authority was transferred to someone else, or both.
Polling has consistently indicated that Americans don’t want Biden to run for re-election, suggesting that they viewed him as an emergency caretaker president when they elected him in 2020, and had some expectation that given his age, he would not run again. A mid-November Yougov/Economist poll, taken entirely after the Democrats held serve in the midterms, showed that 56 percent of adult citizens believe he shouldn’t run in 2024—higher than the percentage saying they don’t want to see former President Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Only 39 percent of Democrats answered yes. His average approval rating remains mired in the low 40s.
It is hard to look at these numbers and conclude anything other than that Democrats won in spite of Biden rather than because of him. That isn’t because he’s been a terrible president. He had the fortitude to withstand the media freakout during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, quietly rolled back America’s destructive drone warfare in the Middle East and repaired tattered relationships with critical European and Asian allies. From his skillful handling of the Ukraine crisis to the very real harvest of bipartisan bills he has signed in the past year, Biden has outshined his predecessor in every conceivable way.
Can Biden step aside, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) just did, to pave the way for the next generation of leaders? The biggest obstacle might be the myth of Biden as the indispensable candidate, the only one who can beat Trump. It’s true that he polled marginally better than his chief rivals for the 2020 presidential nomination—senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar, as well as former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. And it’s also true that he won the 2020 presidential election by 4.5 points, the 2nd-best margin in the popular vote this century.
The case that only Biden could have won, though, is quite weak. Here’s how things stood on Super Tuesday on March 3, 2020, just after Klobuchar and Buttigieg left the race and endorsed Biden. Sanders led Trump by 4.9 points in the Real Clear Politics average, Warren and Buttigieg by 2.0 and Klobuchar by 1.6. Biden led by 5.4 points. Here’s why I think these differences were mostly noise—Trump’s number in these averages ranged from 44.1 to 45.2, and only Sanders was as well-known as Biden at that point, likely accounting for the tiny differences in the topline numbers for the other Democrats.
Maybe Trump would have beaten them all. Maybe it was only Biden and his patina of moderation and grandfatherly harmlessness that could convince independent voters to abandon Trump. But the counterfactuals are equally compelling—a younger, more articulate and sharper Democratic nominee could have more capably made the case for what Democrats actually wanted to do with the power they were asking voters to grant them, indicted the whole Republican Party for its support of Trump and emerged from 2020 with larger congressional majorities that would have enabled much more sweeping legislative gains than actually materialized.
That inspirational vigor, more than his actuarial age, is what Biden lacks and what might be sorely needed in a democracy-testing 2024 campaign. Go watch the 2022 victory speeches of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and tell me you don’t think they would be better able to inspire people to turn out and to make the case for the Democratic Party as a whole.
Of course, I’m not Joe Biden’s keeper, and if he wants the nomination, it will almost certainly be his. But I would implore him to think about what is best for his party and his country, and to choose spending much more time with his grandkids over running the country starting in 2025.
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.
