Supporters of former President Barack Obama would like to see President Joe Biden step aside in 2024 and allow younger candidates a chance at the White House, a former Obama aide said on a recent podcast.
One concern is that Biden just turned 80, noted Johanna Maska, who served as an advance team official in the Obama White House, in an appearance on former MI6 Director Richard Dearlove’s One Decision podcast. Another is the good midterm performance of Republicans.
“I worked with President Biden,” Maska said. “I have respect for him in the sense that he’s been kind of a statesman, and I was hopeful that in coming back in power, he would be a transition president, to bring us back from Donald Trump and figure out what our future is.”
“I think that he took the Thanksgiving holiday with his family, now having turned 80 years old, to figure out what he’s doing,” she added. “I think there are a lot of people from the Obama generation that are saying we need new leadership.”
But Biden himself has publicly speculated that he might run again, and many on his staff seem to believe he will, Newsweek reports.
“I hear from a lot of Democrats across the country that they want him to run, but the president will make that decision after the holidays,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told former Wall Street Journal editor Gerald Seib. “But I expect the decision will be to do it.”
“I believe he is going to run, and I SO hope that he does,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said recently. “I think he’s doing an extraordinary job uniting not only this country, but our relationships with our allies. I’m all in with him.”
But Biden remains stuck in low approval ratings that have dogged him his entire term. He wasn’t a popular surrogate on the campaign trail during the midterms.
Polls taken ahead of the Nov. 8 elections showed most Democrats preferred someone other than Biden in 2024.
Current polls show Biden narrowly beating former President Donald Trump in a rematch of the 2020 election, but if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the GOP nominee, those same polls show Biden losing ground, Newsweek noted.
“A big robust primary for us on the Democratic side will actually strengthen us,” Maska said. “We haven’t had a robust primary in the sense of being able to secure all of the voter data that we need to really make sure that our Democratic base is strong.
“So I’m not sure that he’s going to run. I think he’s going to make the decision before April.”
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