In early November of 2010, Joe Biden, then vice-president, joined Barack Obama for his final rally at a large indoor arena in Cleveland ahead of what would be disastrous midterm elections for the Democrats.
But 12 years later as president, faced with another potentially dire rebuke for his party from American voters, Biden has adopted a much more cautious approach — avoiding big events with thousands of people in favour of smaller, less rousing interventions.
The stakes for the future of Biden’s presidency in the midterm elections remain very high: should Republicans win full control of Congress, the rest of his term in office will be consumed by congressional investigations and legislative stand-offs, with little chance that he can enact the rest of his agenda.
The outcome could also shape whether Biden follows through on what he has described as his intention to run for a second term in 2024. A better than expected performance by his party — such as limiting losses in the House of Representatives and preserving control of the Senate — may well embolden the president and give him the confidence to plough ahead with his plans for an eight-year presidency. But large-scale defeats could change that calculation.
“If it’s as bad as some people expect, there’s going to be a lot of chaos in the party. There are going to be demands from many different quarters for a complete change in the leadership — citing the gerontocracy that we currently have,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Harry Reid, the late Senate majority leader.
In his most recent comments about his 2024 aspirations, Biden said that after the midterm elections he would be in the “process of deciding” whether to seek a new term, but was inclined to go for it. “It’s a matter of, can you do the job. And I believe I can do the job. I’ve been able to do the job,” he told CNN.
In Democratic circles, the best argument for a Biden 2024 run is the fact that he has already beaten Donald Trump once, so would be in the best position to do so again against the former president or another populist Republican, especially with no obvious Democratic alternative.
But concerns about his age — he turns 80 next month — and persistently low approval ratings, despite a small recent bounceback — could weigh against that.
Whether or not Biden ultimately runs in 2024, many Democrats and political observers say that keeping a relatively low profile at this stage in the midterms campaign could be good for Democratic candidates and the White House.
On Thursday he visited the grounds of a new semiconductor investment in upstate New York, after holding a series of virtual campaign receptions with House members from Nevada, Iowa and Pennsylvania. So far, he has just two campaign events planned for next week: one in Florida for Charlie Crist, the Democratic challenger trailing Republican governor Ron DeSantis in the polls, and another in New Mexico.
“He’s clearly going out there campaigning where his appearance on the campaign trail will help,” said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist. “[But] in places where candidates would rather not run with big national surrogates and keep it more of a localised race, he and other surrogates in Washington are taking a step back.”
Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University, added: “The more Biden is out there, the more it becomes about him, as opposed to a debate about his policies or about the Republican party.”
The most notable case of a high-profile Democrat distancing himself from Biden has been Tim Ryan, the Ohio lawmaker running for a Senate seat against Trump-backed former author JD Vance. Ryan told Fox News in an interview this month that he was not inviting the president or anyone else to campaign with him in the state, and had “disagreed with Biden on a lot of other issues” from student loan relief to immigration.
But unlike in 2010, when many swing district Democrats were forced to openly disavow Obama and his signature healthcare reform, which was highly unpopular at the time, most in the party are not actively turning their backs on Biden or his record, even if they aren’t clamouring to have him by their side.
“[Biden] is the most impactful president we’ve seen in this country’s history,” Cindy Axne, the Iowa Democrat in a tight contest to keep her seat in the House, said at a virtual reception with him on Wednesday evening.
While Biden has not made big appearances at campaign events for Democrats in pivotal Senate races in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, one exception is Pennsylvania. This month John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in the state, welcomed him and cheered on the bipartisan infrastructure bill the president enacted last year.
“I’m a dude that drives over bridges with my kids in the back seat. Elections matter and that bill was a giant, big win for Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman has been losing ground to Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician backed by Trump, in the final stretch of the campaign, and a loss there — in the state where Biden and first lady Jill Biden were born and grew up — would be particularly painful for the president.
But even if that were to occur, Biden’s supporters feel he would still have a strong case to make for 2024, replaying the successful playbook of Obama and Bill Clinton, who both suffered big setbacks in their first midterm elections and then comfortably won re-election two years later.
“The Biden mantra on the campaign was ‘promises made, promises kept’, and now we’re actually seeing that come to fruition. So, I think he should run,” said Elrod. “We’ve got a leader who is a consensus builder and has accomplished a lot in the first two years of his presidency. Plus there is little appetite in our party for a 20-way primary.”
Zelizer said Biden might be even more determined to run if Republicans are in control of Congress, and doesn’t see him “voluntarily” repeating Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election in 1968.
“It could be that he doubles down. From day one, he ran in part out of a sense of urgency in his mind about what Republican power means in this day and age,” he said. “If Republicans are in power on Capitol Hill in both branches, I guess he would feel that urgency at an even more intense level to run and win.”
But the pressure for a rethink of Biden’s plans has already been mounting from some vulnerable Democrats. “We need new blood, period, across the Democratic party — in the House, the Senate and the White House. I think that the country has been saying that,” Elissa Slotkin, a member of Congress from Michigan, told NBC this month.