Episode Details

My friends, I’m going to press the pause button on today’s news — including the House January 6 hearings that start this evening — and try to answer a big question that hangs over American politics right now like a sword of Damocles: Does Joe Biden have a snowball’s chance of being re-elected in 2024?

With his current approval rate in the cellar, most pundits assume no (at age 81, he’d also be the oldest person ever elected president, slightly exceeding the typical American’s lifespan). The conventional thinking goes that if he gets the Democratic nomination for 2024 (a big if), Biden will be demolished by Trump (or a Trump surrogate like Florida governor Ron DeSantis) — putting America at the mercy of an even crazier authoritarian than Trump version 1.0.

That’s way too simplistic. Biden’s approval rating is now at around 40 per cent. Ronald Reagan was polling at about the same at this point in his presidency when he was grappling with inflation and the inevitable buyer’s remorse that voters feel a year and a half into a presidency. Two and a half years later, Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale. (Reagan was then 73, just short of the typical American’s lifespan at the time.)

As for Trump, his popularity has plummeted since the 2020 election – a casualty not just of most Americans’ outrage at his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his role in the January 6th insurrection, but also of the poor showing (and terrifying characteristics) of many of his endorsees in recent Republican primaries The televised hearings by Congress’s select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection are unlikely to improve Trump’s standing with most voters.

Besides, much can happen between now and the next presidential election to alter the odds – not the least, the composition of Congress after the midterm elections, the outcome of the war in Ukraine, and the economy.

It’s true that many Democratic voters are unhappy with Biden — especially many of the young voters who surged into the 2020 election. They had expected Biden to pass more ambitious legislation on a range of issues -- slowing climate change, subsidizing childcare and eldercare, lowering the prices of prescription drugs, expanding healthcare, and raising taxes on the rich to pay for all this.  

In some ways, Biden has had the worst of both worlds: The 2020 elections that gave Democrats control over both houses of Congress raised expectations that Biden’s proposals would be enacted, but senate Republicans torpedoed almost all of them (apart from benefits to tide people over during the second COVID wave and a deal on infrastructure). Biden also has had to cope with two Democratic senators – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Krysten Sinema -- who vote like Republicans. Even if Manchin and Sinema were willing to support Biden’s proposals, they won't join other senate Democrats in eliminating the filibuster. That means, under current Senate rules, at least 10 Republicans would have to agree with all fifty Democrats to limit debate and move to a vote – a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

An even more basic problem for Biden is that the Democratic Party he knew when he was elected to the Senate fifty years ago from blue-collar Delaware is not the Democratic Party that elected him in 2020. It’s now largely composed of young adults, college-educated voters, and people of color. In the intervening years, many working-class white voters who were once loyal Democrats joined the Republican Party. As their wages stagnated and their jobs grew insecure, the Republican Party channeled their economic frustrations into animus toward immigrants, global trade, Black people and Latinos, LGBTQ people, and “coastal elites” who want to control guns and permit abortions.

These so-called “culture wars” have served to distract such voters from the brute fact that the Republican Party has zero i