The New Yorker:

The 2024 race comes down to just how much America has lost its collective mind about its disastrous former President.

By Susan B. Glasser

It used to be an enormous advantage—or, at least, an enormous perceived advantage—to run as an incumbent in American politics. Presidents who ran for reëlection in the modern era were rarely defeated. With the notable exceptions of Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, a string of two-term Presidents—Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama—shaped much of the past several decades of American political life. But as the country’s post-millennial mood has soured its politics have turned increasingly toxic for Presidents seeking reëlection. As Doug Sosnik, Clinton’s former White House political director, recently noted, the electorate has voted against the party in power in eight of the past nine national elections, a result fully consistent with more than two decades of polls finding that a majority of the country thinks the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. This is a global trend, too; as 2024 began, not a single leader in twenty major democracies had an approval rating above fifty per cent.

Four years after ejecting Donald Trump from the White House, Joe Biden is battling his own bad case of toxic incumbency. A recent Gallup poll shows that, since winning the Presidency, Biden has suffered an across-the-board drop in ratings on everything from his likability (down nine points) and his good judgment in a crisis (also down nine points) to his ability to manage the government effectively (down thirteen points). While some of this decline might be attributed to concerns about his advancing age or qualms about individual policy decisions, it’s hard to see how either would affect views of his personality or honesty (down six points). Much of the problem, it seems, is the thankless job itself. The American Presidency is the ultimate easy target. Whether high gas prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine or post-pandemic inflation at the grocery store, Biden absorbed the outrage while the mitigating steps taken by his Administration have not redounded to his credit.

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