Joe Biden is running for re-election — and based on his announcement video released this week, he plans to make the 2024 election a referendum not on his first term but rather on Donald Trump’s.
For all of Biden’s accomplishments in his first term, it’s clear that what motivates Democratic voters most is not a litany of policy achievements but rather the specter of what might happen if the other guy wins. The same dynamic is largely true of Republicans. We are living in an era of extreme polarization in which fear, not hope, is the greater driver of electoral outcomes.
Considering Biden’s low approval numbers and the mood of the country, which can perhaps best be described as “agitated,” the president’s chosen strategy isn’t necessarily surprising. Biden wouldn’t be the first president to make his re-election more about his opponent than about him. In perhaps the best-known example, unpopular incumbent Harry Truman won election to a full term in 1948 by running against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress. More recently, in 2004, George W. Bush, with approval ratings hovering just around 50%, made his re-election bid a referendum on John Kerry and won, albeit by the narrowest winning Electoral College margin for an incumbent in 88 years.
The strategy has failed, as well, as seen with Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. But Biden has an advantage that neither of those one-termers had — he’s most likely running against a former president who is deeply unpopular, particularly among independents. Unlike other incumbents, Biden doesn’t have to define his most likely opponent. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Biden will be the first president to have run against a former president since 1912 (William Howard Taft vs. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson). As a result, there are few Americans who don’t already have distinct and largely unalterable opinions about the former president. There’s a reason, after all, that historians…
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