‘Won’t be a shock’ if Biden drops out of 2024 race, says biographer

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A man who wrote the book on Joe Biden says he still thinks it is possible that the incumbent president steps aside and lets another Democrat head their party’s ticket in 2024.

Franklin Foer, author of the upcoming book The Last Politician, told NBC’s Meet the Press in an interview this weekend that he believes the president has carefully left open the possibility of changing his mind before the year’s end.

The president’s bid for re-election has been met with widespread concerns about his age, including from his own party. Meanwhile, his likely opponent in a 2024 general election is almost certainly Donald Trump, who is just a few years younger than Mr Biden and has also faced his own calls to let younger leaders take the reins.

“I would say it would, it would be a surprise to me. But it wouldn’t be a total surprise,” Foer told host Chuck Todd of the possibility of the president dropping out. “It wouldn’t be a total shock.”

“When he talks about his life, he uses this word, fate, constantly,” Foer continued. “Joe Biden is a very religious guy, and fate is a word loaded with religious meaning. And he always talks about, ‘He can’t say where fate goes.’ And so I always, when I hear that, to me, it’s the ellipses in the sentence when he’s talking about his own future.”

The most obvious issue plaguing that calculus for Mr Biden: as of now, most if not all polling shows his vice president, Kamala Harris, significantly trailing Mr Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup for 2024.

But Mr Biden, 80, has remained adamant that he will serve again — even as polling shows that most Democrats would prefer he step aside. As a result, the 2024 election looks set to be a rematch.

Mr Trump remains under multiple criminal indictments, including for his actions taken to prevent Mr Biden from taking office after the 2020 race ended in Mr Trump’s defeat.

The ex-president continues to refuse to accept his defeat, and has proclaimed his innocence in all of the 91 counts of which he is charged.