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On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden announced in a video who will run for a new term for the presidency of the country, in the 2024 elections.
The announcement was long overdue, and implies that Biden will most likely be the US Democratic Party’s candidate for president. The US political system provides that in any case the primary party passes first, but usually when an incumbent president runs for a second term, the other politicians of his party avoid running. At the moment, no prominent Democratic politician has run for the primaries, which Biden will easily win, barring big surprises. Biden will turn 81 this year, and when he was elected two years ago he was already the oldest president in American history. If he were elected for a new term, at the end of the four years of presidency he would be 86 years old.
Biden announced his candidacy on the same day he did four years ago: before then he had tried unsuccessfully twice, in 1988 and in 2008 (in the first case he had withdrawn shortly before the start of the primaries, while in the second he was defeated by the future president Barack Obama, of which he was later vice president).
In the short video with which he made the announcement, Biden said that “fighting for American democracy” was the task of his first term, the one that began in 2021, but that in the country “MAGA extremists are organizing to take away our our freedoms”. MAGA is the acronym of Donald Trump’s first election campaign slogan (Make America Great Again), and has become the symbolic acronym of American far-right exponents who support Trump. For this reason, Biden said, taking up an old speech of his, “we are fighting for the soul of America”.
According to the surveys conducted in recent months, a new election between Biden and Trump (like the one in 2020) would be extremely contested: Biden is on average ahead by a few percentage points, but not enough to be able to define himself in the lead. The same is true in a confrontation between Biden and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who may be the only Republican capable of beating Trump in the primary (DeSantis, however, has not yet run).
However, it must be remembered that it is still extremely early to consider the polls reliable: the electoral campaign has not yet begun and the elections will be in a year and a half.
The fact that Biden is already the oldest president in American history and that he will be 86 at the end of any second term worries voters, including those of his own party: numerous polls show that Democrats they would prefer a younger and fresher candidate. At the moment, however, there is no one in the political landscape who can replace Biden. The former president is also considered a very strong candidate in a possible new clash with Donald Trump, whom he has already defeated in 2020.
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The Democratic primary will conclude with the party’s national convention, which will be held August 19-22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. Barring major surprises, for Biden the primaries should be a formality, also because at the moment there are no major political candidates besides him. The Democratic National Committee, i.e. the body that manages the party, has made it known that it does not intend to organize public debates between the candidates.