So Joe Biden is starting his 2024 campaign with a problem, which is that most people don't

want to

But also not completely unusual if you take the trump weirdness out of it. I mean we've went back and polling and around this point in their terms,

Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, they also look pretty unsteady in the polls and they won re-election pretty easily.

So, is Biden following the footsteps? Is he in a uniquely bad spot? How does age play into this? How does Trump play into this?

I wanted to spend an episode digging into the case four and against Biden. I wanted to try to get both sides of it.

I wanted to do it with somebody who knows him and knows his team pretty well. So I want to have John Favreau.

John Favreau, of course, who's Barack Obama's chief speed trader. He's now, of course, one of the hosts of PodSafe America and one of the founders of Crooked Media.

As always, my email is recluncho at nwetimes.com.

John Favreau, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I want to do this by going through the questions and then the challenges Biden faces in running for re-election and then looking at the strengths he has.

And so I guess the obvious place to begin is that most Americans don't want him to run for re-election. So there's a recent AP Nork Paul found only 26% want him to run again, pretty standard from the polls I've seen.

Washington Post Paul found Democrats are split 47 47 on whether he should run. So what do you make of why so few Americans and even Democrats want to see his name on the ballot in 2024?

So there's a few reasons for that. I think the question, do you want an incumbent to run again, shouldn't incumbent run again.

So the numbers you get from that tend to be lower than approval ratings, horse race numbers, et cetera. So that's just like sort of an overall thing that happens in polling.

The next sort of level of this is as polarization has increased over the last decade or so, voters tend to be unhappier with the state of affairs and politics, with incumbents, with their choices in both parties.

So there's a general crankiness among voters that sort of seeps into most politicians or approval ratings. And then I think specific to Joe Biden, there are of course concerns about his age.

I did a bunch of focus groups in 2022. And it's not necessarily the criticism that you hear from Republicans, which is like, you know, he's completely senile and someone else is running the government.

And he's just a puppet and all that kind of stuff. It's more they thought when they elected Joe Biden in the first time that he was going to be a bridge to the next generation that even though he didn't say it, that the implication was that he was going to serve one term.

And now, you know, they think he's getting up there in age and they are a little uncomfortable about that.

Let's do age directly at this for a little later in the conversation. We were going to work up to it. But when I talk to people and when I've looked at focus groups, this is a thing I hear the most about.

So I mean, obviously Biden, all this president in US history, be 86 at the end of a second term, two thirds of Americans in a Quinnipiac poll thought he was too old to run.

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