HUFFPOST
For all of the accomplishments, legislative and electoral, of President Joe Biden’s first term, he starts his reelection bid staring a very uncomfortable fact in the face: Even a majority of Democratic primary voters do not want him to run for president again.
Similar results have come up again and again in polling, coupled with his persistently underwater approval rating and concerns about his age and acuity throughout the electorate. It would seem to make him ripe for a primary challenge, but no contender within the Democratic mainstream has emerged. It has left some Democratic operatives fearful the party is sleepwalking into a potential electoral disaster.
Faiz Shakir, a progressive operative who ran Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, summarized the ambivalent feelings about Biden and a potential contest against former President Donald Trump.
Biden is “not seen as a strong leader. He’s got all of his problems and issues,” Shakir told HuffPost, arguing that Biden’s penchant for seeking consensus can sometimes make him seem less assertive. “That said, I do think he can beat Trump in a rematch.”
Interviews with Democratic operatives and voters show the anxiety is mostly rooted in Biden’s status as an octogenarian and the occasional falls and verbal flubs that spring from it. While there is some frustration with inflation and the way two rogue Democratic senators flustered Biden’s grandest ambitions, much of the worry among Democratic voters — ironically, for anyone who lived through the 2020 Democratic primaries — now focuses on Biden’s electability and whether swing voters will cast a ballot for an 80-something who often sounds like an 80-something.
Biden and his team have sought to neutralize both Republican attacks about his age, and the angst that those attacks induce in Democrats, by alternately making light of the topic and chiding the press for focusing on it too much. In remarks to abortion rights groups following their endorsements on Friday, Biden joked, “I know I’m 198 years old, but all kidding aside, think about that. I never ever thought I’d be signing an executive order protecting the right to contraception.” The joke drew loud laughs from the crowd.
Meanwhile, on social media, senior White House aides like Communications Director Ben LaBolt were circulating an analysis by liberal watchdog Media Matters that panned mainstream media outlets for treating Biden’s age as a much bigger issue than Trump’s. The subtitle of the piece is: “Even though Biden is only three years older than Trump, 89% of candidate age mentions were about Biden.”
There is little doubt Biden will coast toward the nomination. While early polls have shown surprising amounts of support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with many views outside the party’s mainstream, the Democratic National Committee has not scheduled any primary debates and is slated to strip convention delegates from candidates like Kennedy who compete in unsanctioned nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Interest groups who could provide important backing for a challenger are instead flocking to Biden’s side.
“If anyone had the balls to take him on who is legitimate — like a [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer or a [Sen. Raphael] Warnock — they’d become a legend and they’d be the nominee,” the progressive Democratic strategist said, requesting anonymity to freely criticize their party’s leader. “But the thing is, you can’t take him on, because there is no primary. There are no debates. There’s nothing going on.”
Biden’s campaign and his allies maintain the most indicative poll was the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats grew their majority in the Senate and lost the House only narrowly, one of the best performances for the party in the White House during a midterm election in modern political history.
