Biden Must Remake His Candidacy

His approval polling is too weak to afford not to mount a full-scale campaign in New Hampshire and other battleground states.

Joe Biden’s reelection campaign isn’t going well. Since announcing his bid for a second term in April, the president’s poll numbers have remained dismal. RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls gives him a 41.4 percent approval rating among likely voters, while 53.8 percent disapprove. And it won’t necessarily get better when Biden is in a two-person race against a MAGA Republican. The overall RCP average of recent polls currently has Biden trailing former president Donald Trump by 1.4 points, while a mid-May Harvard CAPS/Harris survey put the incumbent down by seven points against the indicted Republican. An early May ABC News/Washington Post poll had Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading Biden by five points.

These numbers should be a clear wake-up call. Biden’s been a better president than most progressives expected, and he’s clearly preferable to Trump, DeSantis, and the lesser Republicans of 2024. But grassroots Democrats aren’t exactly embracing their president’s repeat candidacy. After he announced, 52 percent of Democrats surveyed for an Associated Press/NORC poll still said they’d prefer Biden didn’t run.

That doesn’t mean prospective Democratic primary voters are rushing to back the president’s announced challengers—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine skepticism disqualifies him in the eyes of many Democrats, and author Marianne Williamson—who draw a combined average total of roughly 25 percent in nationwide polls. But it does mean Biden’s candidacy suffers from a dangerous enthusiasm gap.

That’s got to change. If Biden won’t step aside— —he must remake his candidacy.

iden’s Rose Garden strategy of spurning campaign events—is dangerously misguided.

Biden must motivate the base with an economic and social and racial justice vision that excites young people and brings out voters in record numbers in November 2024.

There will be those who say Biden is best served by focusing on governing in the months to come. That’s only half right. A sitting president can’t spend all his time campaigning. But Biden should recognize the link between bold governance and bold campaigning. Instead of wasting months negotiating with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republicans happy to keep him pinned down in D.C., Biden should follow the advice of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and override the Republicans—beginning by deploying his 14th Amendment powers to end the debt-ceiling charade once and for all. Then Biden should hit the campaign trail with a bold, progressive message that he needs a second-term mandate to vanquish the MAGA Republicans and transform America.

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