Joe Biden is deeply unpopular. But can Democrats find an alternative for 2024? | Ross Barkan

For now, Biden is emboldened. No prominent Democrat will cross him and he will feel especially motivated if Trump is back on the campaign trail

The Democrats find themselves with a 2024 conundrum. Joe Biden, the party's standard bearer, is widely disliked. A new poll found that a 64% of Democrats would want a candidate other than Biden to seek the nomination in two years. Rapid inflation has eaten away at the 79-year-old president's popularity and he is viewed as increasingly out of touch, a vestige of another era that many voters want to leave behind.

At the same time, Biden will easily win a Democratic primary if he runs again. Sitting presidents are rarely forced aside. The top candidates in a hypothetical primary don't want to take him on - almost all of them ruled out the idea of waging a direct challenge. This is understandable, since no single governor or senator has the ability to defeat Biden, one-on-one. Democrats look warily to examples like Ted Kennedy, who ran a primary against President Jimmy Carter and was soundly beaten. Carter went on to lose the general election, in 1980, to Ronald Reagan.

Ross Barkan is a New York City based journalist