The president no longer seems absolutely certain to go for a second term, leaving the party, his top aides, and potential candidates unsure about ‘24 and very quietly mulling Plans B.

---

 Edited  by |ANNA sam

  North America  section -  CJ journalist

    Washington -  22 Feb 2023

---

Joe Biden’s closest advisers have spent months preparing for him to formally announce his reelection campaign. But with the president still not ready to make the plunge, a sense of doubt is creeping into conversations around 2024: What if he decides not to?

Biden’s past decisions around seeking the presidency have been protracted, painstaking affairs. This time, he has slipped past his most ambitious timetable, as previously outlined by advisers, to launch in February. Now they are coalescing around April.

But even that target is less than definitive. People in the president’s orbit say there is no hard deadline or formal process in place for arriving at a launch date decision. According to four people familiar with the president’s thinking, a final call has been pushed aside as real-world events intervene. His cloak-and-dagger trip to Kyiv over the holiday weekend took meticulous planning and the positive reaction to it was seen internally as providing him with more runway to turn back to domestic politics.

While the belief among nearly everyone in Biden’s orbit is that he’ll ultimately give the all-clear, his indecision has resulted in an awkward deep-freeze across the party — in which some potential presidential aspirants and scores of major donors are strategizing and even developing a Plan B while trying to remain respectful and publicly supportive of the 80-year-old president.

“An inertia has set in,” one Biden confidant said. “It’s not that he won’t run, and the assumption is that he will. But nothing is decided. And it won’t be decided until it is.”