Biden Will Be the Nominee in 2024 If He Wants to Be (and History Says He Does)

President Joe Biden (D-DE)

Normally we don't discuss the presidential election two years out on this blog, but I need one more re-watch before we do our next Oscar Viewing Project (I have seen all of the 2002 movies, and we'll be back to ballots right after this, but it's been 20 years since I've seen some of these films and a couple of them need a refresher that doesn't involve a teenager's eyes), and I honestly don't have a lot to say about the midterm environment right now (Democrats doing better than expected, but after several cycles that the polls overestimated the left, I am still struggling to read the tea leaves).  So we're going to break that rule to talk through something that's been bothering me about the race: the conversation about whether or not Joe Biden will run for a second term, and whether his current approval rating actually hurts his chances of getting through a primary (if he does run) without a serious primary challenge.

The reason I'm doing this is because while I hate talking races two years in advance, I love a history lesson, and I think that people are forgetting that these conversations always happen.  Leading up to 2012, there was a lot of talk about whether or not Barack Obama would shake up his ticket.  Proving how malleable politics is, the conversation was about whether or not he should remove Vice President Biden from the ticket to add on one of his most popular cabinet secretaries, Hillary Clinton (oh how the times have changed).  He didn't do that, and as a general rule within politics, you should respect Occam's Razor: that a president & vice president will run for reelection, and they will get the nomination of their party.

That's because, by-and-large, that's what always happens.  Since the passage of the 22nd Amendment over 70 years ago, only twice has an incumbent president voluntarily given up the White House, in 1952 (President Truman) and in 1968 (President Johnson).  The first was because Truman, who was exempt from the 22nd Amendment, had already served nearly eight years in office, and combined with massive unfavorable ratings and the fact that the country was clearly ready for a change after 20 years of the Democrats in the Oval Office, he declined.  President Johnson in 1968 was facing dismal approval ratings, spurred largely by the failure of the US to win the war in Vietnam, and was also in ill health.  After a surprisingly close race against Sen. Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, and the subsequent entrance of Sen. Robert Kennedy into the presidential race, Johnson decided to forgo running for a third term.

Both of these men have something in common that they don't share with President Biden-they were in their second term.  No president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 has voluntarily foregone a run at a second term, and to assume that Biden would do so just because he is older is forgetting a lot of presidents (including Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt) received similar critiques but went ahead with runs again (whether these were well-advised or not is a conversation for a different day).  So while I think any conversation about 2024 is premature, if you must discuss the race, assume that President Biden will be running for the White House until told otherwise.

Conversely, you should also assume that he will be the nominee.  History bears this out as well, and particularly recent history bears it out, and I'll explain why.  First, the last time that a sitting president ran for his party's nomination and lost it was in 1884, when Chester A. Arthur lost the nomination.  It's simply not something that happens-the best candidate for the incumbent party is always the incumbent, even if they are unpopular, and history has shown us that time-and-time again.  Presidents Clinton & Obama had awful midterms, and looked like goners two years out from the election...they won in landslides.  It's true, yes, that people like Jimmy Carter & Donald Trump couldn't turn their numbers around, and I am not going to sit here and say that Joe Biden is a guaranteed win (he's not) but he's certainly not a guaranteed loss, and more pertinent to today, if he runs, he'll win the nomination.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

There's two reasons for that.  The first is borne out by Chester A. Arthur-when you throw out the incumbent president, or even when they face a tough primary, they tend to lose.  Arthur lost that nomination to James G. Blaine, a name you probably don't know as well as Grover Cleveland, and that's because Blaine lost that election, the only Republican presidential nominee between the Civil War and World War I to never become president.  If you look at more recent history, presidents who endure tough primaries tend to also lose, even if they win the nomination.  Gerald Ford faced off against Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1976, and while he (barely) won the primary, he lose the general a few months later to Jimmy Carter.  Four years later, Carter had to fend off Sen. Ted Kennedy and while the president won, he ended up losing the general election in 1980.

Kennedy is a good representation of the second reason as to why Biden will get through the primary unscathed as any, and it has as much to do with the Massachusetts senator as it does the election itself.  In 1980, when the senator took on Carter, Kennedy had a sense of inevitability to him.  While Chappaquiddick was something he could never outrun, Kennedy, in the wake of the deaths of his two older brothers he felt like a "future president" in a way few others had before him.  In running against Carter, though, he showed that the emperor had no clothes.  The golden boy lost to the peanut farmer, and though Reagan had staged a comeback four years later, Kennedy was not Reagan.  It's hard to believe now given he has become omnipresent in Republican politics after two landslide victories, but Reagan was assumed to be unelectable due to how conservative he was (in echoes of conversations we're having right now, Carter was hoping to have to face him in 1980 because he thought he'd be easier to beat).  Kennedy, on the other hand, had nowhere to go but down.  Had he waited and let Carter either win reelection or lose in 1980, he would've been pretty much unbeatable for the nomination in 1984 or 1988, as no other figure but a sitting president had the stature to best the Massachusetts senator on his first foray into presidential politics.  By losing in 1980, he proved himself to be vulnerable, and also angered a number of Democrats who thought he cost them a White House by damaging Carter in a race Kennedy couldn't win.  As a result, he joins people like Hillary Clinton and Bob Dole as political titans of their era who couldn't quite get over the last hump into the White House.

Kennedy's story is what will keep serious contenders out of the White House race if Biden is running.  Even Capitol Hill figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have been critical of President Biden will likely skip such a race, knowing that it'd be unlikely to succeed and almost certainly would tarnish their brands permanently.  All of these polls that show Biden against people like Warren & Sanders are fool's errands.  If he runs, it will not be prominent Democrats but people like Andrew Yang, Nina Turner, or Mark Cuban running against him, all of whom the president will outpoll.  The conversations about 2024 make good copy, but they are pointless until Biden announces (which he won't do until at least spring 2023), and given he's almost certain to run for reelection, are pointless since if he runs, he wins.