ExplainerCan Joe Biden win again? Here’s how past incumbents fared
- Primary battles are a sign of whether an American president will win re-election
- That is good news for Joe Biden, who has avoided any significant challengers
No president wants to give up the power and prestige that comes with the office after only one term, and Joe Biden is no exception. He’s pushing forward even though polls show a majority of Americans don’t want to see him run again.
Here is a look at when modern US presidents announced their decisions to seek a second term, what their Gallup approval ratings were at the time and how things turned out for them.
Harry Truman
He was vice-president when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, near the end of World War II. Truman decided to run for a full term of his own, and he announced his candidacy on March 8, 1948.
He had an approval rating of 53 per cent in a poll conducted two months earlier. Truman was expected to lose the general election to Thomas Dewey, a Republican, but he pulled off a narrow victory.
Truman announced on March 29, 1952, that he would not seek a second full term after losing in the New Hampshire primary to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. His approval rating had sunk to 22 per cent amid economic trouble and the Korean war.
Dwight Eisenhower
Eisenhower, a Republican, had an approval rating of 75 per cent shortly before he announced his re-election campaign on February 29, 1956. He had suffered a heart attack months earlier at age 64, leading to questions over whether he would run.