President Joe Biden’s Reelection Odds – May 2nd, 2024
Bottom Line: Coming into any Presidential Election cycle with an incumbent seeking reelection, the odds favor the existing president. President Trump became just the tenth to lose a reelection bid (if you include Gerald Ford who was the incumbent president defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 Presidential Election after having taken over for Richard Nixon). Meanwhile, 21 incumbents who’ve run for reelection have won.
What that means is...
- 67% of Presidents who’ve run for reelection won
There is a clear incumbency advantage. A presidential reelection bid is first and foremost a referendum on the incumbent president. History has shown that if people are generally satisfied with the performance of the president – they'll vote to stay with him. That necessarily makes the relevance of the challenger a secondary consideration. In this breakout I've taken the historical approval ratings of incumbent presidents running for reelection tracking the outcomes of those elections. Notably, in my final update preceding the 2020 Presidential election, President Trump’s reelection odds were shown to be just 32%. This method once again proved to generally be predictive of the actual outcome.
My previous update to this story was in early April. President Biden’s reelection odds stood at 26% as of that update. Here’s where President Biden’s reelection odds stand as of today with six months to go before Election Day:
- 23% based on an average 40% approval rating (the lowest of this cycle)
President Biden’s current approval rating is four points lower than President Trump’s on the same date, eight points lower than President Obama’s and nine points lower than President George W. Bush’s. What we see, as we’re six months away from Election Day, is President Biden not only underperforming the historical norms for an incumbent at this point in his presidency, but also historically low performance. This means a generic ballot Republican contender is currently heavily favored to win the election as of today. Congruently, former President Donald Trump is showing a head-to-head advantage in a rematch against President Biden.
In Florida, President Biden’s approval rating stands at just 35%, indicating that a generic ballot Republican (and Donald Trump) is currently a prohibitive favorite to win our state. This is a dynamic I'll track from time-to-time as we advance deeper into the election cycle and will track regularly in the final months leading up to Election Day 2024.