Three quarters of US doesn’t want Joe Biden to stand for re-election in 2024

As the economic downturn and questions over competency take a toll more than 70 per cent don’t want Biden to stand for re-election.

More than 70 per cent of Americans do not want President Biden to stand for re-election in 2024, according to a new poll, as the economic downturn and questions over competency take a toll.

Biden’s Democrats are on course for heavy losses in November’s midterm elections, when the party could lose its razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress. A Republican-led Congress would make the president’s legislative agenda, including voting reform, almost impossible to implement.

The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 71 per cent of Americans did not think Biden, 79, should seek a second term. That would make him the Democrats’ first one-term president since Jimmy Carter, who lost the 1980 election.

A third of respondents thought that Biden was too old - he will be 82 at the election, while 45 per cent said he was not up to the job. The president’s overall approval rating was only 38 per cent.

Reports from the White House suggest Biden has become irritated by the speculation about his future. Soaring inflation, foreign policy setbacks and difficulties in passing legislation have all compounded the problem.

“President Biden may want to run again but the voters say ‘no’ to the idea of a second term, panning the job he is doing as president,” Mark Penn, co-director of the polling group, told The Hill website. “Only 30 per cent of Democrats would even vote for him in a Democratic presidential primary.”

Carter was the last Democratic president to face a serious primary challenger, but eventually saw off an attempt by Ted Kennedy to unseat him.

Donald Trump is believed to be considering an early announcement that he will stand for the White House for a third time. The former president is still wildly popular among Republican grassroots members. It had been widely assumed that Trump, 76, would wait until after November’s elections before deciding whether to run again, so that he could gauge his popularity from the success of candidates he is backing in congressional and gubernatorial races.

Serious presidential candidates typically wait until about a year before the election to declare, yet some of Trump’s backers are urging him to confirm that he is standing within the coming weeks.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, has argued that an early announcement would allow voters to concentrate on Trump’s policy differences with the Biden White House. “It’s up to him if he runs or not,” Graham said in an interview. “But the key to him being successful is comparing his policy agenda and policy successes with what is going on today.”

Others argue that Trump has been damaged by the congressional hearings into the events of January 6 last year when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election. An early declaration would allow him to reassert control, they suggest.

Testimony last week from Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief-of-staff, suggested the former president’s staff knew that the crowd could get violent days before the riot and that Trump was desperate to join them at the Capitol. Trump has dismissed Hutchinson’s testimony as “all lies” and “bull”.

Independent voters are less keen on a Trump candidacy, with 61 per cent of respondents in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, saying he should not run again. Among those polled, 36 per cent said he was erratic, a third said he would divide the country, and 30 per cent said he was responsible for the January 6 insurrection.

A majority of those polled said they would consider a moderate independent candidate in 2024, with 60 per cent saying that they could support a third person if Biden and Trump ended up securing their parties’ nominations.

The Times