Before winning the presidency three years ago, Joe Biden had spent more than three decades striving for the office, mounting unsuccessful bids in 1988 and 2008. But on Tuesday, he claimed that he may have been content with being a one-term president were it not for Donald Trump. “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” he told donors gathered at a fundraiser in Weston, Massachusetts, according to The New York Times. “But we cannot let him win.”
It is difficult to imagine a reason for the highly unusual admission that does not involve Biden’s age; at 81, he is already the oldest president in history—a fact that concerns voters across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, Biden appears to consider himself the Democratic Party’s best chance at defeating Trump, whom he views as an existential threat to American democracy, even as polls suggest a ”generic Democrat” would perform far better in a race against the former president.
Hours after making the comments in Massachusetts, Biden tried to walk them back while speaking to reporters during his return to the White House. “I expect so,” he replied when asked if he would still seek reelection absent a rematch with Trump. “But look, he is running, and I have to run.” Biden was then asked whether he would consider exiting the race if Trump were to drop out, to which he responded, “No, not now.”
In September, CNN published a survey that found roughly two thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want a different nominee for president, with the vast majority pinning their trepidation on Biden’s “mental competence/sharpness/senility,” “health,” or “ability to handle the job.” Meanwhile, over the last month, several other polls have found Biden trailing Trump nationally and in the handful of swing states that help decide presidential elections.
For Democrats, the latest bad polling news came from a Harvard youth poll released Tuesday. It found that fewer voters under 30—a demographic that skews Democratic—plan to vote next year than did at roughly the same time in the last presidential race. Limited youth participation was almost certainly a factor in Trump’s 2016 victory, when just 39% of voters aged 18–29 cast ballots, according to the Tufts Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. For comparison, the 2020 election, which Democrats are now hoping for a repeat performance of, saw an 11-point increase in youth turnout. However, come 2024, Republicans could also be negatively affected by the cohort’s disillusionment: The Harvard youth poll found that young Republicans and independents were more likely to disregard the upcoming presidential election than their Democratic peers.
