“Rarely is a movie sequel as good as the original movie. We can all think of some Number 2 movies that would have been better if they had never been made. American voters may have similar concerns about the next presidential election as the prospect of a repeat 2020 election with the same figures in the lead is increasingly fading.

With these words, journalist Sarah Smith welcomed the official announcement of the nomination on the BBC website. Biden, last Tuesday. How Donald Trump has already entered the track and is far ahead of all his opponents, the most likely scenario seems to be a rematch between the two gladiators in 2020. A development that the vast majority of Americans oppose: according to the latest polls, only one in 20 citizens would like a second duel between Biden and Trump, and two in five would not prefer neither of them to lose. Especially for the incumbent, 70% of Americans and 51% of Democrats avoid a second term.

The main reason, at least for Democratic voters, of course, is his age. At 80, he is already the oldest president the American nation has ever known. If he wins in 2024, he will be 82 at the start of his second term and 86 at the end. Shortly before he announced his candidacy in a three-minute video, The New York Times, a Democratic-leaning newspaper, published a vitriolic editorial that, in short, said that Biden’s age was a perfectly legitimate concern for voters. They didn’t even hesitate to poke fun at the president’s stereotypical response to those who voice similar concerns (“the only thing I can tell you is: look at me”), reminding us that Biden doesn’t really give Americans the ability to “watch him”: this is the president who has answered the fewest questions from journalists over the past century, with the exception of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (also old and suffering from Alzheimer’s during his second term).

In his previous campaign, Joe Biden hinted that he was considering a single-term presidency: that he chose to run at an advanced age only to prevent Trump’s nightmarish re-election, and that he intended to play the role of a bridge so that Kamala Harris or another Democrat from a young generations came to the White House. However, Trump is still too strong to die politically. A day after last November’s midterm congressional elections, after the failure of several prominent Trump candidates, 44-year-old Florida Gov. Ron de Sandys was seen as a highly likely Republican presidential nominee. Today, the shares of the latter are skyrocketing, and Trump is ahead of all his opponents by a huge margin. In fact, his popularity is growing with each new prosecution filed against him by elected Democratic prosecutors.

It is the specter of Trump’s return that makes Democrats perceive Biden’s candidacy as a necessary evil, a bitter and possibly dangerous medicine to be swallowed with a closed nose. After all, the seasoned politician beat Trump in 2020 and was credited with better-than-expected Democratic results in the midterm elections, so he can reasonably be expected to win again in 2024. With Vice President Kamala Harris and other rising stars of the party somewhat disillusioned over the past two and a half years, no other candidate seemed more promising.

Although the three-minute video released last Tuesday did not feature Biden’s predecessor at all, the anti-Trump element was dominant. The keyword was “freedom,” and the incumbent has portrayed Trump as “extremists” who threaten basic individual rights. The recipients of this message were mainly two critical groups of the electorate: blacks and women. The first was addressed by the image of Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Biden’s first person of color to the Supreme Court. On the women’s side, the Supreme Court and Republican-controlled state abortion decisions have made the president’s job easier: as the midterm elections have shown, Republicans are paying a heavy political price for any “success” they have made in trying to restrict women’s right to make decisions for themselves about their bodies.

Tradition is also one of the Democrats’ trump cards, as the rule is that the president must be re-elected for a second term. Counting the previous two and a half years bolsters their hopes that Biden will be no exception: a $1.9 trillion astronomical program. dollars to fight the consequences of the pandemic, another trillion. for infrastructure development, cheaper medicine for the elderly and student debt relief, a large increase in the federal minimum wage while raising business taxes, union-friendly policies. Meanwhile, inflation is slowing and unemployment is at a 100-year low. With that said, it appears to be once again dominating the critical industrial Great Lakes states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan) that have played a pivotal role in the previous two contests.

Of course, nothing has been finalized yet. If the Republicans end up finding a younger, more dynamic candidate to replace Trump (whose lawsuits could be unexpectedly fruitful), Biden’s position will be more difficult. The possible success of Russia in the war in Ukraine or the unfavorable economic situation, such as the one that, to everyone’s surprise, deprived the “planetary” Bush of victory in 1992, would also play a negative role. it’s erased from the horizon, forecasts are mixed, with The Wall Street Journal giving Biden a slight lead, and the Economist and Harvard University seeing Trump ahead. In the year and a half left before the elections, all possibilities remain open. Even the re-election of Trump, which, contrary to the well-known aphorism of Marx, would confirm that the first time History unfolds like a farce, and the second time like a tragedy.