Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a recent Wall Street Journal poll believe that US President Joe Biden will not seek re-election in 2024.
In the survey, the Wall Street Journal reported that 52 per cent of respondents said they don’t think Mr Biden will make an attempt at being re-elected in November 2024, compared with the 29 per cent who believed the contrary.
Nineteen per cent indicated that they were undecided about whether they thought the 79-year-old leader would pursue re-election.
When drilled down to just registered Democrat voters in the survey, however, the scales tipped in the current president’s favour.
Forty-one per cent said they believed that Mr Biden, currently the record keeper for the oldest person to assume the presidency, would run for re-election, and only 32 per cent said they thought he’d choose to remain a one-term president.
Twenty-six per cent of registered Democrats in the survey said they were unsure of what he planned to do in 2024.
Despite the divide outlined in the Wall Street Journal poll, the current president has indicated that he does, in fact, plan to make a run for re-election in 2024, should he remain healthy enough to do so.
Were Mr Biden to make a run for re-election in today’s political climate, a face-off with his previous runner-up, Donald Trump, could prove to be a close one.
In the same Wall Street Journal poll, a separate question asked respondents to indicate who’d they support between the two septuagenarian leaders. Within this pool, both candidates garnered 45 per cent of support from voters in a theoretical stand off.
The 1,500 respondents to the poll came from a pool of registered voters and was conducted between 2 March and 7 March through a combination of cell phone texts, landline phone calls and online internet surveys. The outlet reported that the poll had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
Both hypothetical candidates for the 2024 US election have been battling low approval ratings.
For Mr Biden, a near record level low approval rating has weighed down the president of late, with many citing economic frustrations intensified by inflation and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. And for Mr Trump, while the same approval data hasn’t been available since he exited the Oval Office in January 2021, his hold on the Republican Party does appear to be slipping.
“While the party is focused on the November 2022 general election, Trump’s gaze is fixed on the primary election season that begins next spring,” Politico reported last year.
Indeed, as recently as two weeks ago, Mr Trump confirmed that he’d set sights on a 2024 run for the US presidency.
“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” Mr Trump said of running for a third time, the Associated Press reported.
During his keynote address delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, the former president also dragged out some of his now staple grievances, which included blaming his 2020 election loss on false accusations of widespread voter fraud – a claim that remains to be unsubstantiated with any evidence.
