Joe Biden's Hopes of Reelection Face One Major Stumbling Block

With Joe Biden's announcement that he will seek reelection as president of the United States on Tuesday, in the next 18 months he will have to overcome one major hurdle if he is statistically likely to win a second term: a majority of Americans currently don't think he's doing a good job.

According to the latest aggregate poll by website FiveThirtyEight, 52.8 percent of Americans disapprove of the U.S. president as of April 24, with 42.5 percent approving. When he took office in January 2021, he had an approval rating of 53 percent.

While Biden will likely breeze through a thin Democratic field and looks best placed to take on the Republican candidate, recent polling suggests he may struggle against his former adversary Donald Trump or anticipated newcomer Ron DeSantis, the current Florida governor.

Recent surveys have largely placed Biden a few points ahead of Trump in a likely 2024 runoff. A YouGov poll, conducted between April 14 and 17 of 1,027 registered voters, put the sitting president four points clear of Trump.

However, several more recent voter surveys by YouGov and Harris have Trump ahead by one and five percentage points, respectively. Another Harris poll of 1,845 registered voters put DeSantis ahead at 43 percent to Biden's 40.

Running as an Underdog?

Christopher Phelps, a professor of American political history and elections at the University of Nottingham, in the U.K., previously told Newsweek that though it was "much, much too early to know how this is all going to play out" these snapshots were "interesting" as they suggest "the president of the United States against any Republican comer is the underdog."

As Gallup noted in 2020, among modern-day presidents, those with an approval rating of 50 percent or more before the election went on to grasp a second term, while those whose job approval loitered below that tended to lose—with the exception of George W. Bush, who had a pre-election rating of 48 percent.

His father, George H. W. Bush, in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 failed to measure even above 40 percent before they lost their reelection bid, while Trump's on November 1, 2020 was just over 44 percent. Trump continues to claim that his loss was the work of election fraud, though no formal evidence of this has been found.

Biden's approval rating since taking office has roughly followed the path of his two predecessors—starting out above Trump's before plateauing, and following in step, if below, the dip Obama saw after coming to power.

'Finish the Job'

Advocates of the 80-year-old president have argued that he inherited a global pandemic that greatly affected the nation's economy, that he has returned the U.S. to growth and that he led the global response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A USA Today/Suffolk poll of 1,200 voters, conducted between April 15 and 18, found 85 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 thought he had done a good job while in office, but 43 percent were less excited about supporting him again.

When it came to views about the future of the economy—which, at a time of high inflation, Phelps said would be the top priority in voters' minds—Americans have seemed largely unconvinced. Some 61 percent of U.S. voters have low levels of confidence in Biden to make good decisions about economic policy, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center on April 7, a view that has not changed since last year.

Stressing an incumbent president's record on the campaign trail may play to Biden's plea in his reelection announcement to "finish the job," but if a majority of U.S. voters view "the job" negatively come Election Day, it could prove disastrous for the Democratic leader.

"Besides the normal kind of tendency of voters to vote [on] the economy, there are these very particular issues having to do with personality and with the culture wars, and with women's rights, LGBTQ rights, race, and so forth—democracy itself," Phelps said. "There is a reason why the GOP did not pick up the House more decisively in the 2022 election; it's because all of these cultural or social-political issues."

Biden picked up on these issues in his announcement video. "When I ran for president four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are," he said. "The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer."

Culture-War Issues

The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 has reignited the debate about abortion, with many Republican states seeking to limit or ban the practice, arguing for the protection of lives of unborn children. Biden has sided with abortion-rights groups, and his administration is currently fighting a legal battle over the most commonly used abortion pill in the U.S.

Phelps said the outcome in 2024 "may actually hinge in an unusual way on the vice-presidential nominees, if Trump follows through on some of the people he's mentioned as potential candidates."

While Trump has yet to pick a running mate, stating in February that "a lot of people" were "auditioning," names already being mentioned include Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand representative from Georgia; Kari Lake, the Trump-backed GOP candidate for Arizona governor in 2022 and election denier; and Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference and congresswoman from New York.

Phelps noted that Republicans had been "really pushing the envelope where they rule [in] deep south states like Florida" on culture-war issues such as abortion rights and transgender inclusion, which he argued had been beneficial to Democrats in the 2022 midterm results as well as in the election of progressive judge Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

As such, a GOP ticket so heavy on candidates that are very vocal on these issues may bear on the election debate, and potentially improve Biden's chances with Independents. Phelps argued that it could even overcome concerns about the president's age, who would be turning 82 come the election and would be 86 by the end of a potential second term.

"If you're running Greene and Trump, Biden's age doesn't matter to a lot of people; it's just how to stop this far-right bid to take over the American government," Phelps said.