With the conclusion of the exhausting 2020 election season, our minds naturally turn to the next presidential election. One thing we do know about future national elections is that they will be targets for the Republican party to try and game the system. Hopefully in the coming years democrats and the few anti-Trump republicans will pass legislation to patch up the holes in our electoral system that have been exposed in 2020. For the sake of discussion, let's ignore the looming attempts to dismantle democracy by the increasingly authoritarian GOP. After all, if electoral democracy does indeed come to an end, there isn't much point in talking politics.
Joe Biden has said he sees himself as a "transitional president" as opposed to a transformational one. Many pundits have extracted from this his intention to stay for only one term to undo the damaging policies of the Trump administration and set US politics on a more stable path. It is notable that Biden will be 78 years old when he takes the oath of office in January, the oldest president on inauguration in American history. Given that his age and health were major topics in the campaign, a challenger would have even more ammunition against him the next time around.
The conventional wisdom is that incumbents have an advantage in elections, so it doesn't seem far fetched to think that a reelection bid is on the table. If the Biden presidency manages to overcome GOP obstructionism to a meaningful degree and is otherwise successful in policy, I think he will run again. This all depends on how his mental and physical health holds up in office, of course. The Oval Office has been known to accelerate the aging process, so who knows if he'll want to risk not being fully able to handle his duties for an extra four years.
I also wonder if becoming an intentional one-term president might unnecessarily jeopardize control of the White House. One reason for superstition about 2024 is that the last two times an incumbent decided against running, both democrats - Truman and LBJ, the the republican ended up winning the presidency. In addition, no two consecutive democrats that did not originally run on the same ticket have won the presidency back to back since Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. Perhaps the conventional wisdom doesn't mean much anymore, but it sure doesn't ease democrats' anxiety about a repeat of 2016.
