Will Biden win in 2024? 3 things to track, chaos continues in Sudan: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Will Biden win in 2024? 3 things to track

President Joe Biden has announced his reelection campaign. USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page has three clues she's tracking to see what his chances are. Plus, chaos continues in Sudan, the Taliban has killed the mastermind behind the Kabul airport bombing, USA TODAY Health Reporter Karen Weintraub looks at some lessons the U.S. can learn from its COVID-19 response, and USA TODAY Entertainment Host and Producer Ralphie Aversa and USA TODAY Movie Critic Brian Truitt look ahead to summer movies.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 26th of April 2023. Today, a look at President Joe Biden's reelection bid. Plus, violence continues in Sudan, and we look at what the US got wrong during the COVID 19 pandemic.

♦

President Joe Biden is running for reelection, formally announcing the bid with a three minute video yesterday. USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page has three clues to track for whether he'll get four more years. Susan, welcome back to the show.

Susan Page:

Hey it's great to be with you.

Taylor Wilson:

President Joe Biden has officially launched his reelection campaign. What do we know about his campaign so far, Susan?

Susan Page:

Well, we know that he made some people nervous by waiting until now, although in fact it's not that late for a president to announce. There was a lot of speculation maybe he'd reconsider, maybe he wouldn't run for a second term. That turned out to be wrong. He announced in this three minute video that he is running and he outlined a campaign theme much like the one he used in 2020, saying that the soul of the nation is on the line in this election.

Taylor Wilson:

And will Vice President Kamala Harris be running with him?

Susan Page:

Oh yes, absolutely. One of the striking things about this video was how often you see Vice President Harris in very friendly ways with the president. Some presidents don't really feature their running mates that much, but this one really made it clear that she is on the ticket and that he is embracing her.

Taylor Wilson:

So Susan, how do Biden's current approval ratings compare with past presidents when they announced their reelection bids?

Susan Page:

It's worse than most presidents at the point they announced their reelection bids, with the exception of Donald Trump, who was just a little bit lower at this point during his tenure in his first term. But Biden is not that much behind them. Of the last nine presidents, only three of them had approval ratings above 50% when they announced that they would run for second terms. And by the way, two of those lost.

Taylor Wilson:

Susan, you outlined these three clues to track on whether Biden will win in 2024. Let's start with whether or not he's challenged for the nomination.

Susan Page:

This is a big one because we know that presidents like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, who get challenged in the primaries are wounded, they're hurt, they hold the nomination, but then they lose the general election. It's a sign of a divided party. We do not think that Biden is going to have a credible challenger for the nomination in the Democratic Party this time, and that is very good news for him.

Taylor Wilson:

And how important is the economy to Biden's reelection chances?

Susan Page:

The economy is always the most important or one of the most important issues in any national election. That's going to be true this time too. At the moment, Biden is fighting stubbornly high inflation, but the effort to tamp down on inflation always runs the risk of tipping the economy into a recession if the Fed tightens up on money supply in too big a way. So that is the calculation that's going on now. Can they soften inflation without creating an economic downturn?

Taylor Wilson:

And you also write about whether a credible third party candidate runs. How crucial is this to Biden's reelection success?

Susan Page:

Well, we know that when a third party candidate that gets a significant number of votes runs, it can change the outcome of the election. It means that a candidate can win with less than 50% of the vote if a third party candidate is getting some significant portion. That was true for Bill Clinton in 1992. He won with just 43% of the vote because Ross Perot was a credible third party candidate, got almost 20% of the vote. Or remember this, Al Gore lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush when he failed to win Florida by 537 votes, and that was a state where Ralph Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, got more than 97,000 votes.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Susan Page, always great info for us. Thanks so much.

Susan Page:

Thank you.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

The Sudanese capital of Khartoum fell into deeper chaos yesterday when a warring faction seized control of a national health lab that contains biological material. That's according to a UN official who called the development extremely dangerous. Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, the World Health Organization's representative in Sudan, said one of the parties fighting for control of the country kicked out all of the technicians from the lab where measles, cholera, and polio samples are held. A three day truce in Sudan came into effect on Monday, but has done little to ease violence. Foreign diplomats have been fleeing the country in droves in recent weeks, and the US has evacuated its embassy. Fighting in the country is between two rival generals: Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, who leads the Sudanese military, and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. The violence has prompted many aid agencies to suspend operations in the country, and fuel and food prices have skyrocketed.

♦

The Taliban has killed the Islamic State terrorists who plotted the deadly attack at Kabul's airport during the US evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021. A suicide bomber attacked one of the airport's entrances as Afghans huddled looking for a way out of the country. The violence killed more than 180 people, including 13 US troops, according to a US official. And another 45 US troops were injured. Three days after the airport attack, US forces launched a drone attack that mistakenly killed 10 innocent Afghans, something the Pentagon called an honest mistake. The Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, with up to 4,000 members, is the Taliban's most bitter enemy and top threat militarily. The group has continued to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, especially against the country's minority groups.

♦

It's been more than three years since COVID-19 put the US and the world on pause. The virus has killed more than a million Americans and millions more globally, and experts say we could have and should have done more. A group of more than 30 experts has written a book called Lessons From the COVID War. It looks into exactly what went wrong in how the United States faced the pandemic. USA TODAY Health Reporter Karen Weintraub spoke with two of them. Hello Karen.

Karen Weintraub:

Hi.

Taylor Wilson:

So you spoke with two of these COVID Crisis Group members to get a better sense of what went wrong with the US COVID response and how a repeat can be prevented. What did they say were some of the biggest failures of the pandemic in the US?

Karen Weintraub:

I think the biggest one was the lack of national leadership. What tended to happen during the Trump administration - and I don't want to just blame Trump, there's plenty of blame to go around - but Trump fairly early on decided that it wasn't a national problem, that it should be decided by the 350, I think it is, state and local health departments around the country. And really when you're dealing with something that does cross borders, it made it very difficult to make the right decisions.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, you mentioned crossing borders. How do these experts view the US COVID decisions compared with those of other countries?

Karen Weintraub:

The statistics that jumped out at me were early in the pandemic our death rates were about 29% higher than Europe and comparable countries. In the middle of the pandemic, we were about 50% worse. By now, we're over 80% worse. Our death rates are that much higher than they needed to be essentially compared to other countries. So nobody did it perfectly, but it does seem like our mistakes were compounded. And the main difference... So at the beginning we didn't take the right precautions and then later we didn't take advantage of vaccines to the degree that other places did. So really there were a lot of problems to go around. One of the other things that these researchers cite is they say that we fought a 21st century pandemic with a 19th century government structure. The CDC, for instance, is great at producing reports a couple of months after something is over, but they're not really good at real-time data, understanding what's happening. We really were flying blind for most of the pandemic, maybe still in terms of what things look like on the ground in part because of this lack of data.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, I'm happy you mentioned the data because they also talked about problems with data sharing across the different departments as a major issue in US health institutions. How big of a problem is this still?

Karen Weintraub:

It really is a huge problem. And again, three years into this pandemic, it has not been solved. Right now the CDC is dependent on states to willingly hand over data so it knows what's going on. Sometimes the data from Idaho might be in a different format than the data from New York. They don't talk to each other, they can't communicate, they don't understand what's going on. It takes a ton of resources to make those data sets compatible. So really that's one of the top priorities I think these folks would identify to avoid a next time, would be solving this data problem.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Karen, million dollar question. How ready is the US for the next pandemic?

Karen Weintraub:

Unfortunately, we're not much readier than we were three years ago, and that was the point of this group, that they wanted to say, "Here are the mistakes we made and here's what we need to do to be ready." They had hoped that there would be a federal commission coming to these conclusions. The author of this book was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which did that at a national scale. No such thing has happened with COVID, so they did it themselves. They say that we're really not prepared and that the chances, this is the horrifying thing, the chances of another one happening, another global pandemic happening really are quite high. Some researchers estimate that there's a 20 to 40% chance that we could have another pandemic just within the next decade. Global pandemic. We all hope it's a 100 years hence. The 1918 flu was more than 100 years ago, but nobody thinks that we can get away with waiting another century.

Taylor Wilson:

Karen Weintraub, thanks so much.

Karen Weintraub:

Sorry not to be more upbeat. Thanks for having me.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

Summer is almost here, and so too are summer movies. USA TODAY Entertainment Host and Producer Ralphie Aversa caught up with USA TODAY Movie Critic Brian Truitt for a look ahead.

Ralphie Aversa:

And USA TODAY Film Critic Brian Truitt joins us now. Brian, a lot of capital A list stars in these movies on your list. Which stars stick out?

Brian Truitt:

Well, Tom Cruise helped save movie theaters last year with Top Gun, and he's back again doing crazy stuff with the seventh Mission Impossible movie. Two summers and two Tom Cruise movies after the pandemic is pretty fun.

Ralphie Aversa:

Of course, with the big stars comes a lot of hype. Is there one movie more hyped than perhaps the others?

Brian Truitt:

Fast X. Vin Diesel's franchise keeps growing, and now we have Jason Momoa and Brie Larson joining that whole crew. Live action Little Mermaid coming out, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, because it's Harrison Ford's final Indiana Jones film. So there's a lot.

Ralphie Aversa:

You mentioned so many franchises there and characters that we're familiar with. What about the characters that we are not familiar with? Any of those on your list that we should be watching out for this summer?

Brian Truitt:

I think from a historical perspective, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer's going to be a really interesting film because it delves into the history of the atomic bomb and America and our own dealings with that and science and stuff. But I feel like people are going to be really interested to see Pixar's romantic comedy Elemental, which is about a water dude and a fiery lady meet cute and give each other perspectives on their lives. And Pixar's always good for a lot of emotion and comedy and stuff, and we haven't seen anything like this before from them. So I'm looking forward to it.

Ralphie Aversa:

USA TODAY Film Critic Brian Truitt. Brian, thanks so much.

Brian Truitt:

Thank you.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every day of the week right here wherever you get your audio. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden's 2024 chances, lessons from COVID-19 response: 5 Things podcast