As this writer has been saying for months, 2024 will not be a rematch of 2020, as neither of the previous nominees will be on the presidential ballot in the general election. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer agrees with part of that contention.

🚨 former Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill blurts it out @MeetThePress: Biden won't run in 2024 and Democrats know Kamala Harris would be a disaster too:

"there's no guarantee that Vice President Harris wouldn't face a challenge for the nomination…it could be a free-for-all"

— steve hilton (@SteveHiltonx) May 1, 2022

Fleischer: President Joe Biden reportedly told former President Barack Obama he will run for re-election. It doesn’t matter what Biden tells anyone today. What matters is what is about to happen in November.

In a little over six months, Republicans will likely win the House and the Senate. As important as Election Day 2022 will be, what happens the next day will be more significant.

That’s the day the Democrats will turn on President Biden. It’s the day that the whispering campaign among Democrats about whether a soon-to-be 80-year-old man is in good enough health, politically and cognitively, to be the man at the top of the ticket in 2024, will burst into the open.

It’s inevitable. The stop Biden drumbeat will grow every day, whether it takes weeks or a few months, until Biden acknowledges reality and declares he will not run for re-election.

The notion that an unpopular party, on the heels of a major midterm defeat, will want an unpopular, 80-year-old whose health and vigor are in decline, to lead it into the future is the stuff of fantasy. Among Democrats today, it may be good manners not to talk about it, but it’s time to stop pretending. Joe Biden will have no choice and won’t run.

Democrats have never loved Joe Biden. But they did love Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump. Despite Biden’s losses in the first three presidential nominating contests in 2020 (Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada), Biden won the Democratic nomination because of the Democrats’ deep desire to throw Trump out of the White House.

Recent polls show Trump is now beating Biden. According to the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll published by The Hill, Trump is ahead of Biden by 6 points. According to the latest presidential poll by FiveThirtyEight, Trump is ahead of Biden by 4 points. On the heels of defeat in November, the Democrat Party and its leaders will be in a surly mood. On the one hand, they know that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came back from massive defeats in their first midterm elections to be re-elected to the White House two years later. Is Biden, Democrats will wonder, another Clinton (then aged 50) or Obama (then aged 51) Or will he remain an 80-year-old in decline, who defeated Trump, but now it’s time for him to go?

In 2019, 28 Democrats ran for president. Who can forget Beto O’Rourke, Michael Bloomberg, Marianne Williamson, or Andrew Yang, to name a few, in addition to Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris? Democratic primary debates took place over two consecutive nights given how many candidates there were. Many of these people, along with new contenders (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez possibly), will want to run, beginning immediately after November 2022. The day after Election Day, they will want to plan how and when to run, who to hire, and what donors they can line up.

They know that the longer Joe Biden insists he is running, the harder it will be for the party to organize an alternative. They’ll start to maneuver quickly after Election Day 2022 to save the party and the country. They’ll want Biden out of the way. In 2018, Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro announced exploratory committees in December, just one month after the midterm election. Five other Democratic candidates declared their candidacies or exploratory committees two months after the midterm, in January 2019…It’s too soon to know who will win in 2024, but in 2023, Joe Biden will be a lame duck and Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief.

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