President Joe Biden is expected to launch a reelection bid like none before it on Tuesday with a call for Americans to choose him again to save democracy – less than three years after his defeat of Donald Trump was supposed to restore normality and unite the country.
Biden’s quest for a second term will unfold amid what would normally be deeply unpromising circumstances, with his approval rating languishing in the low 40s, with the country exhausted by successive crises after pandemic isolation ceded to a battle with soaring inflation. Polls show that a majority of voters – and even a majority of Democrats – don’t want him to run again. And the last thing the country appears to want is a Biden rematch with the 45th president, who’s the current frontrunner in the nascent Republican primary race.
But Trump’s strength inside the GOP forms the core rationale for Biden’s campaign. The incumbent reasons that he’s the best bet Democrats have to prevent his predecessor from winning a second term that would surely be even more wild than the first.
Biden will begin his final campaign after a lifetime in politics from a familiar position of low expectations. But he’s repeatedly defied conventional political wisdom and connected with swing voters by standing as the antidote to Republican extremism. Paradoxically, even though much of his party seems to wish it had an alternative, Biden appears sufficiently strong to ward off the emergence of any significant primary challengers.
The president is expected to ignite his reelection bid with the release of a campaign video on Tuesday – four years to the day after launching what was then seen as a long-shot effort to fulfill a White House dream first kindled by an unsuccessful race for the 1988 Democratic nomination.
Amazingly, the same motivation that underwrote his 2020 White House run –…
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