The clues in the State of the Union that suggest Joe Biden will run for president in 2024

President Joe Biden will probably announce in the next couple of months that he will run for a second presidential term in 2024. Were there clues in his State of the Union speech about his re-election campaign?

The State of the Union address is an opportunity for the president to lay out his legislative programme for the coming year. In Mr Biden’s speech on Tuesday, he also sounded as though he was making the case for his 2024 run, and made it clear he has no plan to cool down his political ambitions, despite lukewarm polling.

As he rattled off his list of achievements and laid out his plans for the future, we got a preview of what his campaign platform could be.

Mr Biden had more to boast about in 2022 than many would have predicted, after his difficult first year in the White House.

Some of the achievements he is claiming are economic: more jobs created in two years than any other president has created in four years; unemployment at the lowest rate in half a century.

Although the bounce back from the pandemic lay-offs began under his predecessor, Donald Trump.

He spoke of legislative successes, too. In his speech, he touted passing a huge infrastructure bill, that will help rebuild crumbling roads and bridges across America, by forging cross-party support.

Then there were his climate measures that will encourage the production of clean energy, and tax breaks that will encourage the production of semiconductor chips in America, to reduce reliance on China.

Add to that the much better-than expected-results for Democrats in last year’s midterm elections and you can see why Mr Biden feels he is a good position to win a second term.

Most importantly, he doesn’t have any serious challengers for the nomination. No other senior Democrats would dare put their names forward as potential candidates if the president says he is running again.

And yet there are also serious weaknesses too.

A recent ABC-Washington Post poll that asked voters about a possible Biden vs Trump rematch gave Trump a 48% to 45% advantage. That’s within the margin of error but still concerning for Democrats.

“Two years is forever and it’s just one poll, but if he’s faring this poorly after a string of wins, that should be worrisome,” tweeted Julian Castro, a former Obama cabinet member.

Other surveys suggest the prospect of a Biden candidacy does not excite voters.

An AP-NORC poll suggests that 62% of Democrats don’t want him to run again. Many said they think he is too old and would prefer a younger candidate.

A CBS poll published on Tuesday showed that well over half of voters asked, said Biden’s policies were making inflation, gas prices and the overall economy worse.

Of course, it is almost ridiculously early to be looking at polls and trying to work out what voters will be thinking 21 months from now.

What Team Biden are relying on is that by 2024, voters will be feeling the benefit of some of the legislation that Biden has already passed.

They hope his infrastructure spending will not only have repaired the fabric of the nation but will create even more jobs. They hope manufacturing industries will be seeing increased investment. And that inflation may have been tamed.

When confronted about the poor polling figures, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Democrats won in the midterm elections because of Mr Biden’s successes.

As they look to mount a 2024 campaign, his team needs to prepare themselves on questions about his age as well as his record.

The Republican rebuttal on Tuesday night by a 40-year-old rising star Sarah Huckabee Sanders highlighted the generational difference and called on a new wave of young, conservative politicians to seize the moment.

As the oldest US president in history, how Joe Biden appeared in his primetime speech mattered almost as much as what he had to say.

Everyone knows he would be 86 by the end of a second term. Even voters who support him frequently express doubts about his advancing years.

This was a much more energetic performance than last year’s address.

On Tuesday he enjoyed taunting his Republican opponents. Fluent and confident, he succeeded in sounding like he still has a real passion to “finish the job” – a line he repeated often.

Within hours of finishing his speech, Mr Biden headed to the key electoral state of Wisconsin to promote his infrastructure plan.

It’s a presidential visit that may look a lot like a campaign stop.