President Joe Biden is telling Democratic Party stalwarts that he’s planning to run for office in 2024, the clearest indication yet that he’ll seek his party’s nomination for president in two years’ time.
According to an NBC News report, Biden told Al Sharpton that he’s planning on running for a second term in a private conversation during an event with civil rights leaders at the White House.
“I’m going to do it again. I’m going,” Biden said, according to an official in Sharpton’s National Action Network.
Party insiders appear to be readying for another Biden run, and his political aides are reportedly taking steps to prepare for an eventual announcement. Publicly, however, Biden has not been as forthcoming, perhaps in order to avoid campaign finance rules that would apply to him as soon as he becomes an official candidate for the presidency.
“It’s much too early to make that kind of decision,” Biden said in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program when asked about the possibility of running for reelection.
Polling data shows that voters overall — including most Democratic-leaning voters — would prefer a different Democratic candidate in 2024. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in September, for example, found that only 35 percent of voters who identify as Democrats or lean Democratic want Biden to run, while 56 percent say the party should nominate another candidate.
Other polls have shown higher support among Democrats for a second Biden presidential run; a Morning Consult/Politico poll late last month, for example, showed that 58 percent of Democratic voters want him to run for a second term. But that number didn’t include Democratic “leaners” — and voters overall in that poll were opposed to another Biden run, with just 30 percent of respondents saying Biden should run again.
In late 2021, Biden said that he would be more likely to run in 2024 if Trump also sought reelection.
“Why would I not run against Donald Trump for the nominee? That’ll increase the prospect of running,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
“Biden’s the one that can say I already slayed that dragon and I’ll slay him again,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley recently told Business Insider.
Polling between the likely top candidates for the two major political parties shows that Biden is slightly ahead of Trump. A Yahoo! News/YouGov poll published last week showed that, if a hypothetical election was held between the two today, Biden would get 47 percent of the vote while Trump would get 45 percent.
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