Can Joe Biden win the battle of the dinosaurs?

Last week, a ninety-two-year-old media titan agreed to pay out a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on behalf of his network Fox News. This week, an eighty-year-old Democratic president will announce that he is running for re-election next year, even though polls suggest 70 percent of Americans don’t want him to. Joe Biden will probably end up facing the seventy-six-year-old Donald Trump, the man at the heart of that Fox/Dominion defamation. Welcome to America, the land where dinosaurs rule. 

President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David running through his re-election agenda. His video campaign announcement will reportedly air Tuesday, kickstarting another nineteen months of unpleasant speculation about his health and fitness for high office. If Biden wins next year, and assuming he doesn’t die or become so incapacitated he has to resign, he will be eighty-five by the time he leaves the White House. This is not a trifling matter. Polls have repeatedly suggested that even a majority of Democrats think he should not go on. Concern about his age is the most commonly cited factor in these polls. 

The 2024 presidential election looks increasingly likely to be an even weirder rerun of the 2020 contest

Old age is, of course, not entirely a weakness. The reason Biden won the nomination in 2020 is that he was seen as a “steady hand.” His decades of experience in Washington, and the Silent Generation goodliness he goes to rather too great lengths to exude, meant he successfully pitched as the man America needed to defeat Trump. The return to normalcy, and so on. 

But Biden’s presidency is anything but normal — and, if it weren’t for the facts that Trump is still the strong favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024 and there isn’t a very clear Democratic alternative nominee, many of the Democrats now hailing the commander-in-chief would be busily trying to undermine him in favor of someone — almost anyone — else. The 2024 presidential election looks increasingly likely to be an even weirder rerun of the 2020 contest — another referendum of Donald Trump.  

Biden’s advisors keep puffing up his substantial achievements, but these are thin to say the least. He’s been quite effective when it comes to passing trillion-dollar-spending bills. His administration has arguably dealt with the Ukraine war quite skillfully — spending many more billions, but not sending in thousands of US troops to die in a war that may prove unwinnable. But the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan will still be in voters’ minds — and anyway, Americans are more concerned about their own country, where the cost of living has shot up (even if inflation figures suggest it should be coming down) and an illegal migration crisis gets worse and worse. 

The Democrats’ non-disastrous performance in the midterms in November is a point in the president’s favor. But that was in large part luck: the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last summer to overturn Roe v. Wade and throw legal abortion into question motivated larger numbers of women and young people to express their opposition to the Republican Party at the ballot box. The issue of abortion has now flipped, politically: it used to be something Republican leaders would pay lip service to in order to fire-up the large section of the public that feels strong pro-life. Now so-called “reproductive rights” are something the Democrats want to be credibly threatened in order to excite their electorate. It’s an irony that Joe Biden, a lifelong practicing Catholic, may be the first president to win because of his vocal support for abortion. 

The economy issue cuts both ways, too. Biden’s economic protectionism — his Inflation Reduction Act being the most famous example — makes him unpopular abroad but is well-received among significant chunks of an electorate who want its leaders to put America’s interests first: those Obama-Trump-Biden swing voters who are somehow ignored by the media even though they decide who triumphs at the ballot. 

But even the leader of most powerful country in the world can’t keep spending and tariffing his way out of trouble forever. Unless Biden can make voters feel substantially better off in the next nineteen months, he will have to rely on “not being Trump” as his campaign strategy. In other words, the question for 2024 will again be this: which unpopular dinosaur do you prefer? That’s what you might call a major democracy fail.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.