EP107: Joe Biden

Joe Biden has been President of the United States since 2021. However, this episode, unlike most others in this series, isn’t biographical; rather, what my guest and I examine today, are the prospects for Joe Biden’s re-election as US President next year, almost exactly one year out from the 2024 presidential election.

On the surface of it, Joe Biden’s polling numbers aren’t appealing. 538, America’s king of polling companies, puts his approval rating at 38%. My guest today, though, holds little-to-no regard for polling as a way of forecasting election outcomes. That guest is Allan Lichtman, and in the early 1980s, he devised a comprehensive model for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. This model, the 13 Keys to the White House, offers the reader 13 questions provoking answers of either true or false.

But here’s the thing - the true or false questions mostly pertain to the performance of the president in office rather than the two campaigns, hence the general disregard for polling. The questions relate to matters such as foreign policy, economic management, internal party unity and scandal. If you place faith in the 13 Keys model, it shows you that Biden’s poor approval rating has not yet stymied his campaign for re-election, and that a second term for the 46th President is still very much in play. 

So today, Allan and I go through the 13 Keys and assess how the President is lining up against them. 

DISCLAIMER: Allan hasn’t made his prediction for the 2024 election yet, and any assumptions made in this podcast about the way some keys might turn out in the future are all my assumptions. This is another way of saying that not all of the 13 true/false questions can be answered just yet. But some can, and they provide important insights into Joe Biden’s performance as US president thus far.