President Joe Biden’s Reelection Odds – January 11th, 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 president 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%. In other words, this method once again proved to generally be predictive of the actual outcome.
It’s been two months since my previous update to this story. At that time, in early November, President Biden’s reelection odds stood at 41%. What’s changed over the past couple of months?
Here’s where President Biden’s reelection odds stand as of today:
- 34% based on an average 40% approval rating
President Biden’s current approval rating is five points lower than President Trump’s on the same date, five points lower than President Obama’s and 17 points lower than George W. Bush. What we see, as we’re under ten months away from Election Day, is President Biden not only underperforming the historical norms for an incumbent at this point in his presidency, but we’re also seeing record low performance for him at this stage of his presidency. This means a generic ballot Republican contender is currently favored to win the election as of today. In Florida, President Biden’s approval rating stands at just 33%, indicating that a generic ballot Republican 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.