President Joe Biden recently said that he will run for reelection in 2024 under one condition: that he remains in good health.
Biden made comments alluding to running for a second term as president in an interview with ABC’s David Muir.
“Do you plan to run for reelection?” Muir asked Biden this week.
“Yes,” Biden responded, adding that he would only run for a second term if he was in the right physical shape to do so.
“I’m a great respecter of fate. Fate has intervened in my life many, many times,” Biden said. “If I’m in the health I’m in now — if I’m in good health — then in fact, I would run again.”
Biden also said that a Trump presidential campaign in 2024 would only make him more eager to run.
“Why would I not run against Donald Trump for the nominee? That’ll increase the prospect of running,” the president told Muir.
Notably, Biden’s popularity and approval rating have faced a significant drop since the start of his tenure. On March 1, Biden had an average approval rating of 55.4 percent and an average disapproval rating that was under 39 percent, according to an aggregate of polling data collected by RealClearPolitics. Months later, those averages have flipped: Biden’s approval rating now averages around 43 percent, while his disapproval rating is at 53 percent.
If Biden and Trump do face a rematch of the 2020 election, Biden may not fare well. The president’s net favorability in a recent Economist/YouGov poll is -11 points, while Trump’s is -13. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll published last month, a majority of respondents (64 percent) said they didn’t want Biden to run again. When respondents were presented with a choice between Biden and Trump, the poll found that Trump would defeat Biden by around 4 percentage points.
Some advocates have said that Biden could reverse this trend by fulfilling promises he campaigned on in 2020. Although his administration recently announced an extension of the student loan payment pause, Biden has yet to fulfill his campaign promise of canceling up to $10,000 of student debt per borrower — an extremely modest measure that would still likely secure more votes from young people.
But the Biden administration has repeatedly said that the president won’t use his executive power to forgive student loan debt, despite the fact that he has the legal authority to do so. Instead, Biden has shifted the blame onto Congress, saying that they should pass a debt forgiveness bill that he could sign into law — a strategy that would almost certainly fail given divisions within the legislative branch and the ability of Republicans in the Senate to block such a measure through the filibuster.
