President Joe Biden has reportedly told former President Barack Obama that he intends to run for re-election in 2024. He wanted to be president for decades, so his desire to keep the Oval Office is unsurprising. But the case for a second term is quite weak — and voters know it even if Democrats in dreamland don’t.

Inflation is at its worst in 40 years, erasing wage growth. Crime is surging in many major cities. Employers are struggling with labor shortages. Illegal immigration could top 2 million encounters this year, amid a border crisis that has been spiraling out of control since virtually the moment Biden took office.

The last time a Democrat ran for re-election under similar circumstances, he lost 44 states and the party didn’t sniff the White House for 12 years.

The only numbers worse than these dismaying stats are Biden’s own dismal ratings. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the president’s job approval underwater by more than 10 points. Quinnipiac and CNBC have Biden’s approval in the 30s. On specific issues, such as immigration, his disapproval rating is as high as 60%.

An April Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 61% believe the country is moving on the wrong track to just 25% who say it is headed in the right direction. An Economist/YouGov survey taken around the same time showed a similar split: 60% wrong track, 28% right direction.

That speaks to Biden’s more fundamental failure: He campaigned as an expert legislative tactician who would get big things done because he could unify the country and govern skillfully, in contrast with the erratic chief executive he was running against. Instead Biden has gotten little of his agenda passed, the country remains as polarized as ever and the major problems he was elected to solve linger indefinitely.

Biden was supposed to bring back normalcy. He could not. And on issues like COVID-19 protocols, his administration is fighting almost alone against things going back to normal, even if some supporters like the teachers unions would prefer to see us still more masked and shut down. The American people stopped grading Biden on the “not Donald Trump” curve sometime around last year’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan, though hardly a week goes by without the White House taking shots at the 45th president.

So why would anyone think Biden deserves another term? To many Democrats, Biden is an innocent bystander, a Forrest Gump-like witness to history with much worse luck. The only exceptions are the decline in unemployment and the robust GDP growth that would have inevitably occurred following the post-COVID economic reopening. That, they say, Biden’s policies are directly responsible for.

Like the inflation that was supposed to be “transitory,” Democrats hope Biden’s fortunes will soon improve — right in time for the then-82-year-old to win re-election, like an old dog learning new tricks. But these are not unlucky things that have happened to Biden. The border is a mess because his immigration policies have made it one. Inflation is roaring because of trillions of dollars in federal spending, on which Biden would like to pile trillions more. Only his ineffectiveness as a legislative dealmaker, one of his main selling points in the 2020 campaign, has prevented this problem from growing even worse.

Biden ran a contradictory campaign for president. He promised the suburban voters he needed to win over he would govern in a bipartisan fashion and keep his distance from the Democratic Party’s left-wing excesses. He also vowed to his progressive base that he would sign its wish list into law, with Democratic votes alone, like the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It was always going to be impossible for Biden to keep both promises. Instead he has arguably been a failure at both. He has largely eschewed bipartisanship, despite most of his few legislative achievements requiring Republican votes. He’s gotten only one big liberal spending bill passed through reconciliation.

Voters still identify the Democratic Party with masking fanatics, woke scolds, police defunders and haters of religious parents despite Biden’s efforts to distance himself — and often because of his administration’s own policies. Four more years of this is not something to look forward to. Democrats are divorced from reality if they think most Americans do.

W. James Antle III is politics editor of the Washington Examiner and author of “Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?”