Will Joe Biden be re-elected in 2024?

The latest odds at Smarkets give President Biden around a one-in-six chance of being re-elected in 2024. That seems staggeringly low for a sitting president. As a comparison, Trump's odds never went below 30% during his turbulent term of office.

Is one-in-six a fair reflection of his chances? One way to assess it would be to look at the history of all previous presidents. Here's what happened to the 44 to have held the office before Biden:

• 5 died in office in their first term
• 7 didn't run for a second term
• 5 ran for the nomination of their party, but failed
• 11 won their party's nomination, but lost the general election
• 16 were re-elected for a second term

So, perhaps the base rate here should be 16/44 (36%) but of course Biden is already a fair way in to his term and some of these hadn't actually won an election in the first place e.g. if they'd stepped in from VP like Gerald Ford.

Clearly one very significant factor is Biden's age - at 78 years old at the start of his first term, he was by some way the oldest person ever to have been elected and that might be an issue when he's deciding whether to run again in 2024. There's not much doubt that he'd be a lot shorter in the betting if he were twenty years younger.

Also, he's not very popular. After 422 days in office, his fivethirtyeight average approval rating sits at 42%. That's only fractionally better than Trump's at the same stage of his term and below every other President since Harry Truman. The good news for Biden is that his numbers are ticking up a little bit and he'll probably edge above Gerald Ford quite soon. I suppose one could also point out that we are now in a much more polarised period of US politics and the large swings in approval one saw for previous presidents may be a thing of the past. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama's first term approval ratings were very stable after their first year in office

On the other hand, it's not immediately obvious who else the Democratic party might turn to as their nominee in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris is exceptionally unpopular as recent VPs go; her ratings seem to be tracking Biden's, albeit a little bit worse. Pete Buttigieg is next in the betting for the nomination but, as someone from inside the administration, it's not going to be easy for him to challenge a sitting president. Otherwise we are looking at people who have tried and failed before (Hillary Clinton at 27.0, anyone?) but not many others who appear to have much of a national profile yet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be the exception at odds of 70.0 to win the nomination. She'll only just be old enough (the constitution requires the president to be at least 35) but she does have a unique brand and would likely have a significant body of committed support were she to run. Not the worst bet I've ever seen.

I find it hard to imagine that Biden's chances of being the nominee aren't higher than the 28% currently implied by the odds. He says he'll run again and, as the historical records above show, that should make if fairly likely he'll win given the lack of any obvious alternative. Who might he face in a general election? The latest prices say there's about a 60% chance it'll be Trump again or Ron DeSantis, neither of whom are likely to have a lot of crossover appeal to people who voted for Biden in 2020 (not that they would need to do much better than Trump 2020). The comparative prices suggest it'd be a shade of odds-on for Biden to be re-elected were he the nominee. I think that seems a fair reflection of his chances given the extreme polarisation we see among US voters these days, despite the Republicans' electoral college advantage.

To break it down, the latest odds at Smarkets imply the following:

• 42% chance he runs (appears on the ballot in the first primary/caucus)
• 67% chance he wins the nomination IF he runs
• 57% chance he wins IF he's the nominee.
• 0.42 x 0.67 x 0.57 = 16% chance of being re-elected.

My betting instincts make me think the first two legs underestimate his chances but the third one is no more than fair. So, on balance, I think the 3.4 odds of him being the nominee are the best bet here, although I wouldn't put anyone off taking the outright price of 6.4.