President Biden has formally announced on Tuesday April 25, 2023 that he would seek a second term, arguing that American democracy still faces a profound threat from former President Donald J. Trump as he set up the possibility of a climactic rematch between the two next year.
In a video flashing images of a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president said that the “fight for our democracy” has “been the work of my first term” but is incomplete while his predecessor mounts a comeback campaign for his old office that Mr. Biden suggested would endanger fundamental rights.
“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms away,” Mr. Biden said, using Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan to describe the former president’s allies. “Cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
“When I ran for president four years ago,” he added, “I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are.”
The official declaration finally ended any lingering suspense over Mr. Biden’s intentions and effectively cleared the way to another nomination for the president, barring unforeseen developments. While he had repeatedly and consistently said he intended to run, Mr. Biden stoked renewed speculation by delaying his kickoff for months. Now his team can assemble the formal structure of a campaign organization and raise money to finance it.
Mr. Biden tapped Julie Chavez Rodriguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of the iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez, as his campaign manager. Quentin Fulks, a Democratic operative who most recently ran Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election campaign in Georgia, will serve as her principal deputy. But the operation is expected to be overseen from the White House by top presidential aides.
Although he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint that he would serve only one term, Mr. Biden concluded that he was not in fact ready to hand over the torch yet. His decision was fueled in part, aides said, by his antipathy for Mr. Trump and his belief that he is the Democrat best positioned to keep the criminally indicted and twice-impeached former president from recapturing the White House.
In offering himself as a candidate again, Mr. Biden is asking Americans to trust him with the powers of the commander in chief well into his ninth decade. At age 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest president in American history, and, if he were to win, he would be 86 at the end of a second term, nearly nine years older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Mr. Trump, no youngster at 76, would himself outlast every president by age other than Mr. Biden if he were restored to the Oval Office and finished his new term at 82.
As Mr. Biden formally kicked off his campaign, he appeared at this point to be a virtual lock to win his party’s nomination. While many Democrats had hoped he would cede to a younger candidate, no formidable challenger for the nomination has emerged. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the iconic assassinated senator and a vocal critic of vaccines, and Marianne Williamson, the self-help author whose 2020 campaign fizzled before the first votes were cast, have announced long-shot bids but pose little evident threat to the incumbent president.
If Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump square off again next year, it would be the first time that the same nominees faced each other in consecutive presidential elections since 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson for the second time. It would also be the first time a president was challenged by his predecessor since Theodore Roosevelt attempted a comeback in 1912 against his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, in a three-way campaign won by Woodrow Wilson.
While Mr. Biden presides over a more unified party than his potential challenger does, many Democrats privately worry that the president may not be up to another campaign. His overall approval rating remains mired at just over 42 percent, according to an aggregation of polls by the political website FiveThirtyEight, lower than 10 of the last 13 presidents at this point in their terms.
While polls show that most Democrats have favorable opinions about Mr. Biden, a majority of them would still rather he not run again. In a survey by NBC News released this week, 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, said he should not seek a second term. Seven out of 10 of those who did not want him to serve four more years cited his age as a factor.
The New York Times
