It’s inherently kind of crazy that American presidential campaigns take more than a year to run, but they do. Late entrants don’t have a very good track record. Case in point: Michael Bloomberg, who

This could be a sign that Biden is indeed being shielded from press scrutiny.

By this measure, Biden looks better, though. He’s made a perfectly normal number of international trips as president, one of the more physically demanding parts of the job.

What about the campaign itself? In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden was sometimes accused of running a campaign out of his basement. This accusation was false: Biden made a fair number of in-person appearances, especially from September onward.

Nonetheless, this was a considerably less vigorous schedule than Trump, even though Trump got COVID and was also serving as president. And note that the location of Trump’s public appearances were more varied, whereas Biden’s were very heavily concentrated in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan:

So look, I don’t know. But other people are in a position to know — people in the White House, people close to Biden, and potential rival candidates with well-placed sources in Democratic circles. If the choices are Biden running a reasonably normal campaign or a Mystery Democrat doing the same thing, I think it’s close. But if it’s Biden running a Rose Garden campaign versus a different Democrat running a normal one, I’ll take my chances on the alternative, and Biden can join James K. Polk on the list of historically well-regarded presidents who didn’t seek a second term.