He’s running. In a three-minute video announcement published Tuesday, President Joe Biden made his re-election bid official. “The question we are facing,” he declared, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer. I know what I want the answer to be and I think you do too.”
The road to re-election is set to be tough but not impossible to navigate. The biggest question is whether he can convince an electorate that has never been enthusiastic about his presidency that he’s a better choice than whoever the Republican nominee is to move the country forward.
Biden does have the advantage of incumbency. We can look back at his recent predecessors for a hint to how the next year and a half might play out. But there is no perfect historical parallel for what Biden is trying to achieve.
Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden is the most recent reminder that incumbency doesn’t guarantee victory.
When George W. Bush launched his re-election campaign, he was riding high on what was still a feeling of victory in the war on terror, even as the Iraq War was beginning to unravel. Bush managed to win against Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in 2004, in a race that was closer than some may remember, with a single state deciding the election.
Barack Obama, the first Black president, had come into office with a wave of so called post-racial support that four years of tea party protests and a midterm shellacking had chipped away. And yet, Obama still routed Republican challenger Mitt Romney in 2012 after he framed the Republican businessman as out of touch with average Americans.
Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden is the most recent reminder that incumbency doesn’t guarantee victory. But Trump is running again, and no president since Republican William Howard Taft in 1912 has had the challenge of running against a former occupant of the Oval Office, in his case Theodore Roosevelt. Even then, Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate, a…
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