President Joe Biden formally announced Tuesday that he will run for re-election in 2024, asking voters to give him more time to “finish the job” he started when he took office and to put aside their concerns about the presidential campaign. oldest president of the United States for another four years.
Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, is betting that his first-term legislative achievements and more than 50 years of experience in Washington will outweigh concerns about his age. He faces a smooth path to win his party’s nomination, with no serious Democratic challengers. But he is still poised for a hard-fought fight to retain the presidency in a bitterly divided nation.
The announcement, in a three-minute video, coincided with the fourth anniversary of Biden declaring himself a candidate for the White House in 2019, vowing to heal the “soul of the nation” amid Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency, a goal he it remains elusive.
“I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are,” Biden said. “The question we face is whether in the coming years we will have more or less freedom. More rights or less”.
While the question of seeking reelection has been a given for most modern presidents, that hasn’t always been the case for Biden, as a notable swath of Democratic voters have indicated they’d prefer he not run, in part because at his age, concerns that Biden himself called “totally legitimate” but did not address them head-on in the announcement video.
Yet few things have united Democratic voters like the prospect of Trump returning to power. And Biden’s political position within his party stabilized after Democrats performed stronger than expected in last year’s midterm elections, as the president set to run again on the same issues as cheered on their party last fall, particularly on preserving abortion access.
“Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There is nothing more important. Nothing more sacred,” Biden said in the launch video, which described the Republican Party as extremists trying to roll back abortion access, cut Social Security, limit voting rights, and ban books they disagree with.
“Across the country, MAGA (Trump’s slogan) extremists are lining up to take away those fundamental freedoms,” Biden added.
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