Washington— US President Joe Biden officially announced Tuesday that he is running for re-election in 2024, calling on voters to give him more time to “finish the job” he started when he took office and put aside their concerns about renewing the mandate of the oldest President the country has had for another four years.
Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, was betting that his first-term legislative achievements and more than 50 years of experience in Washington would count for more than qualms about his age. He faced an easy path to win his party’s nomination, with no major Democratic challengers. Even so, the fight to retain the Presidency was complicated in a nation marked by deep divisions.
The announcement, in a three-minute video, was made on the fourth anniversary of the date Biden declared his campaign for the White House in 2019 and vowed to heal the “soul of the nation” during Donald Trump’s checkered Presidency, a target that has remained 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 years to come we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or less.”
While seeking re-election was a given for most modern presidents, that hasn’t always been the case for Biden, as a significant portion of Democratic voters have indicated they’d prefer he not, in part because of his age, a concern that Biden has described as “totally legitimate” but did not directly address in his video presentation.
Yet few things have united Democratic voters like the prospect of Trump returning to power. And Biden’s position within his party stabilized after Democrats turned in a better-than-expected result in the midterm elections. The President began his campaign by recapturing the issues that moved his party last fall, especially efforts to preserve 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 video presentation, which portrayed Republicans as extremists trying to remove access to abortion, reduce the social security, limit the right to vote and ban books with which they disagree.
“Across the country, MAGA extremists are preparing to take away those fundamental freedoms,” he warned.
“This is not the time to be overconfident,” Biden added. “That’s why I’m running for re-election.”
As his campaign began to take shape, Biden planned to defend his achievements. He dedicated his first two years as president to combating the coronavirus pandemic and passing big laws like a bipartisan infrastructure package, an initiative to boost high-tech manufacturing and climate measures.
With Republicans now in control of the House, Biden has focused on enforcing those huge bills and making sure voters give him credit for the improvements, while also keeping distance with Republicans ahead of a debt-ceiling dispute. that could weaken the country’s economy.
But the President has many goals and promises to fulfill from his first campaign, and he asks voters to give him another chance to achieve them.
“Let’s get the job done. I know we can,” Biden said in the video, repeating a motto he mentioned a dozen times during his State of the Union address in February, in which he listed everything from banning assault and similar weapons, reduce the cost of prescription drugs or establish a national right to abortion after the Supreme Court struck down legal precedent in Roe v. Wade last year.
Bolstered by the results in the midterm elections, Biden plans to continue to assert that Republicans have embraced what he describes as “ultraMAGA” policies (a reference to Trump’s “make America great again” slogan). , regardless of whether his predecessor wins the bid by 2024.
Over the past few months, the President has tested campaign themes on the ground, including accusing Republicans of fighting for tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy while cutting benefits that ordinary Americans depend on, as well as cutting the access to abortion services.
