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How Democrats Learned to Cast Aside Reservations and Embrace Biden 2024
The president, who is expected to formally announce his re-election campaign this week, has won the full support of his party despite questions about his age and middling approval ratings.
Politics
As President Biden nears the formal announcement of his 2024 re-election bid, one of the most important developments of the campaign is something that hasn’t happened at all: No serious primary challenger ever emerged.
Mr. Biden has all but cleared the field despite concerns about his age — at 80, he is already the oldest American president in history — and the persistent misgivings about the president held by a large number of the party’s voters. Democrats yearn for a fresh face in 2024, according to repeated polls, they just don’t know who that would be.
After Democrats won more races than expected in the 2022 midterm elections, any energy to challenge Mr. Biden quickly dissipated. The left has stayed in line even as Mr. Biden has lately made more explicit appeals toward the center. And would-be rivals have stayed on the sidelines.
The early entry of Donald J. Trump into the race immediately clarified that the stakes in 2024 would be just as high for Democrats as they were in 2020. The former president has proved to be the greatest unifying force in Democratic politics in the last decade, and the same factors that caused the party to rally behind Mr. Biden then are still present today. Add to that the advantages of holding the White House and any challenge seemed more destined to bruise Mr. Biden than to best him.