Joe Biden Is Somehow in a Better Place Today Than He Was Four Years Ago

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

It’s a question routinely posed to voters, deployed first and to great effect in 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan near the end of a debate with President Jimmy Carter. But as another unpopular Democratic incumbent wobbles into an election year, it’s worth asking whether the president is better off than he was four years ago.

A whole lot has happened since January 2020. Back then, candidate Joe Biden was in deep trouble. His third bid for the Democratic nomination had been staggering for months: In October 2019, at the Jefferson–Jackson dinner, the traditional launching pad for the Iowa caucus campaign season, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders generated the most buzz. Biden’s cheering section was noticeably thin. Fundraising had been a problem and Biden was burning through cash. It all prefigured a dismal fourth-place finish in the February caucuses, behind Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren. The punditocracy was declaring Biden’s campaign dead in the water; even many of his allies were deeply pessimistic. “Oh, it was dire,” a Biden 2020 insider says. “It almost seemed impossible, at that point, for him to get the nomination.”

Then, things changed. Barely six weeks later, Biden had the Democratic nomination pretty much locked up. In November 2020, he won the White House, which makes the answer to the “better off” question seem easy and obvious. Of course Biden today, even with job approval numbers badly underwater and with many Democrats still pining for him to step aside, is better off politically now: He’s a president running for reelection instead of being one candidate in a talented field struggling to gain his own party’s nomination. “I would rather, for a whole host of reasons, be Biden now than then,” says Tim Hogan, who was a senior adviser to Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 presidential campaign. “Some of them are pretty basic, structurally: You’re an incumbent president running for a second term, likely against a guy who you’ve defeated previously and who has been vetted nationally so extensively. That’s a good place to be.” Add to the equation that the intervening four years haven’t been perfect for Biden’s likely general election opponent. Donald Trump has been held liable for sexual abuse and defamation, faces a total of 91 felony counts in four different cases, and is contending with a high-profile civil fraud lawsuit brought by the New York state attorney general.

But four years ago, Biden had rabbits he could pull out of many hats. He changed campaign slogans, from the goofy “No Malarkey” to the more apt “Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” More substantially, in early February 2020, Biden shook up the leadership of his primary team, elevating Anita Dunn to run the operation and bringing in Jennifer O’Malley Dillon to implement the strategy. Then, crucially, Biden earned the endorsement of venerable South Carolina Democratic congressman James Clyburn, which helped swing Black South Carolina primary voters into his column and changed the trajectory of the entire race heading into Super Tuesday. Biden also benefited from the contrast with his Democratic primary rivals: A majority of voters believed Sanders and Warren were too far left and Buttigieg too untested to defeat Trump in the general election.

This time around, fewer buttons appear available for Biden to push, internally. He’s likely to stay loyal to Dunn, O’Malley, Mike Donilon, and Steve Ricchetti, the quartet at the top of his political operation, no matter how rough the polling gets. The larger horse race dynamics seem calcified: Biden and Trump are extremely familiar to the electorate, and most voting minds are already made up. There are always wild cards, but the chances of Trump being convicted of anything by Election Day keep shrinking, and the general public so far seems staunchly unwilling to give Biden much credit for an improving economy. “There’s no question that there are headwinds,” says Maria Cardona, a former Hillary Clinton operative who is now a CNN commentator. “But four years ago, there was a real question mark whether Biden was going to be the nominee.”

An incumbent typically runs on his record. Biden can point to a string of domestic successes; he will also be burdened with the feeling that the world, especially in the Middle East, is growing more volatile and deadly. But for all that has happened in four years, the president’s strongest argument remains the same one that boosted him in 2020: Trump would be worse. Biden began making that pitch in earnest last week, with a speech in Pennsylvania centered on the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and Trump as an ongoing threat to democracy. But the next 10 months will be a slog, and even some supporters are skeptical about whether Biden, four years older, can sell the argument as effectively as he did in 2020. “All the energy is going to come from Trump, on both sides—he’ll energize us and he’ll energize the Republicans,” the Biden 2020 insider says. “In a weird way, so much of this, even though he is an incumbent president, is really out of the president’s control. So much of this will depend on how pumped up Republicans are, and how repulsed Democrats are, about Donald Trump.”