Will lame-duck Biden fly to the finish or float off into the sunset?

President Joe Biden is in a strange position. For what is likely the second time in his life, Biden is staring at the end of his career. Close to a decade ago, he was passed over in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes, his boss, President Barack Obama, and top political advisers anointed her the next leader of the Democratic Party. An epically bad decision, it turned out, because she went on to lose to Republican rival Donald Trump in a shattering upset.

Close to a month ago, Biden told the country he had accepted there was not a viable path to victory with him at the top of the party’s ticket in his looming rematch against Trump, his vanquished 2020 rival and the 2024 GOP nominee. Biden decided it was time to step aside, tapping Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him — an honor he felt his boss denied him in 2016. 

Without a campaign to keep him moving forward, Biden is looking at the calendar and counting the days to Nov. 5, Election Day, for a very different reason than he was earlier this year. Biden will leave office 2 1/2 months later, on Jan. 20, 2025. Nearly all presidents experience a lame-duck period when they feel unburdened by what has been and unleashed from what could be as they rush to round out their terms without fear of voter backlash.

The position Biden finds himself in is unique. Only three presidents in the modern era have declined to run for reelection when they were eligible for another term. Presidents who are killed or die in office don’t experience a lame-duck term, but the rest of them have, though they tend to last longer than the five-odd month span Biden has to fill.

Most presidents are lame ducks for years — from the midterm elections of their second term until the end, depending on the makeup of Congress, Rob Mellen, assistant professor of instruction at the University of South Florida, told the Washington Examiner. Biden’s situation is unique, in that he is the first president since Lyndon B. Johnson to decline to seek a second term and is facing a divided Congress that has no incentive to work with him on achieving his policy goals.

And Biden has goals. He isn’t running for office again and that could, if anything, give him the impetus to try to push through a bevy of plans that eluded him until now.

In an address to the nation explaining his decision to bow out of the contest in favor of Harris, Biden outlined more than a half-dozen items he wants to accomplish before he leaves office. The ambitious list includes Biden staples such as making progress on his “cancer moonshot” and cracking down on gun violence.

He was likely going back and forth between working on his speech and cutting a deal with Russia and five other countries to negotiate a prisoner swap that brought former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich home from Russia. Working to release Americans held abroad unjustly was an item on Biden’s lame-duck agenda.

Perhaps the crown jewel, the feather in Biden’s cap would be Supreme Court reform. He ticked it off as an item he wanted in his address and then followed it up with a three-point plan that included a constitutional amendment negating the court’s ruling on presidential immunity, 18-year term limits for justices, and an enforceable ethics code providing congressional oversight of the court.

Those plans are dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House and without landslide victories for Harris and Democrats in November, they aren’t likely to move forward anytime soon.

“They can simply wait him out until the election and find out who’s going to win and who’s going to be the next president,” Mellen said. “So some of the proposals he’s made, like regarding the Supreme Court and others, they’re going to stand no chance whatsoever of even being considered.”

However, not everything on Biden’s to-do list is as divisive as gun control or Supreme Court meddling. And not all of them are as controversial in reality as they appear on paper.

Biden is fond of telling voters he is the first president in a generation who can look into a camera or a crowd and tell everyone listening that the country is not at war. Foreign conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas are a major concern for the president, though.

Mellen said it’s not likely that Biden will successfully cut a deal with House Republicans that could offer a package large enough to end hostilities in Russia — not to mention convincing Russian President Vladimir Putin to give up his war of conquest.

In Israel though, Mellen was optimistic there is enough common ground that Biden could make serious headway in bringing the conflict to a close.

“I think both parties want to see an end to the fighting and the conflict there and they want to avoid any wider expansion of that war,” he said. “I think he might be able to bring both parties together to try to put some pressure on Israel to bring an end to this. And I know even Netanyahu has mentioned what a future is going to look like with Palestine under civilian leadership and not under Hamas. So that could be one area.”

Biden is constrained electorally too. His approval rating is trending up now that he’s faded into the background, and he could appear in select spots to prop up Harris, though those moments are likely to be few and far between.

Harris is trying to put daylight between herself and Biden. She is splitting her time between campaigning and helping her boss finish strong, but pouring time and energy into a fading administration rather than an up-and-coming one could cost her.

“The Democratic Party doesn’t really want him out there on the campaign trail because of his misstatements,” Mellen said. “One of the things Harris wants to do is she wants to distinguish herself from his administration. And the more he’s on the trail, if he even has the energy to do that, the more it’s going to tie her to him.”

There are more than five months left for Biden to put the topper on his five-decade career in public office. A surging Harris could help spark a sprint to the finish featuring a completed checklist, though it appears more likely he’s poised to float out of office like a lame duck on the tides of change.