Did the midterm results give Joe Biden a boost for a re-election bid? The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman made that case sardonically shortly after the expected red wave made barely a ripple in national results. Democrats, expecting to get blown out, had been arranging Biden’s retirement … and now have no standing to push an LBJ strategy for 2024:

Here’s the deal: The comeback kid from Claymont can now argue that his leadership prevented the kind of midterm drubbing frequently suffered by the party of a first-term president. Pollster Mark Penn sees Mr. Biden as one of the night’s big winners.

True, Democrats limited their losses by earning more support than the president in swing districts—and sometimes even by running away from him. But they also can’t blame him for a national outcome that exceeded expectations.

Incumbency has its advantages. The president is now in a stronger position to resist retirement and punish those who suggest it. Stories about Biden cognition may have to wait for White House staff memoirs, rather than appearing anonymously and immediately in the Washington Post. He’s ready and raring to run!

This may sound sarcastic, but Freeman isn’t making a joke. A poor midterm showing would have forced Democrats into a change in direction away from Biden’s leadership. This win — or seriously limited loss — negates the political rationale behind dumping an incumbent president, even one as unpopular as Biden. Freeman predicted that he’d lose 40 seats, but that wouldn’t be enough to push Biden out of the way. Gavin Newsom’s recent declaration of fealty to Biden 2024 more or less makes Freeman’s point.

But is that really the lesson of 2022? Washington Post analyst Aaron Blake takes a look at the polls and comes away with a different conclusion. Biden didn’t win the midterms, and in fact didn’t substantially improve his position even among Democrats. He just happened to be around when Republicans lost the midterms:

We’re digging into cross tabs for all of these numbers, and the margins of error are even larger when you’re isolating something like “Democratic-leaning independents.” It’s also true that Biden appears better off on these measures than he once was, and especially relative to the summer.

But we’re still dealing with a situation in which half of Democrats, at most, want a president of their own party to run again, which is very unusual. And more voters who will select the party’s 2024 nominee consistently say someone else would do better.

It’s worth asking just how much people view the election as an affirmation of Biden versus a repudiation of certain elements in the Republican Party. Democrats did as well as they did, after all, not because voters liked Biden, but because those who disapproved of him only “somewhat” still tilted toward the blue side — rather remarkably. Perhaps Biden gets credit for not turning himself into a lightning rod that took his party off the table for those voters, or perhaps he benefited from a choice election in which the alternative allowed itself to be the issue.

If Biden can lock down nearly half of Democratic voters, he’d still be the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 nominee. And the midterm results could dissuade would-be usurpers who might reason that there’s a premium on unity at a time in which Republicans are shooting themselves in the feet. But these still aren’t the kinds of numbers that foreclose a contested or competitive primary, nor do they suggest that Democratic voters’ confidence in the 80-year-old president’s performance and electoral fortitude has suddenly been restored to its early 2021 levels.

At the moment, Democrats seem to have learned the wrong lesson from the midterms — even after using a successful message. They didn’t run on Biden, after all, but on Donald Trump. If Trump wins the nomination in 2024, that strategy may still suffice. But if Republicans nominate someone else, especially someone significantly younger, then Biden’s going to get scorched coast to coast. He’s still deeply unpopular even in the post-midterm polls Blake uses, and in the overall RCP aggregation as well (41.3/53.7):

Interestingly, this latest RCP average comprises polls taken mainly after the midterms. Reuters-Ipsos puts Biden 20 points underwater, Politico/Morning Consult -14, Emerson -13, and Blake mentions the Q-poll showing Biden’s job approval at -19. If anything, Biden’s approval rating is declining again in the aftermath of the midterms, now that the supposedly existential question has been addressed.

Blake has diagnosed this well. Biden got lucky to some extent that Republicans fumbled the midterms in the Senate and perhaps in the House as well, although the GOP will control that chamber in January. His party made hay out of those mistakes and did about as well with them as possible while still carrying Biden like a millstone around their necks. Any strategy that starts off with Biden as getting a mandate out of these midterms for another run will end as badly as Biden’s assumption of getting a progressive mandate out of the 2020 elections, however.

In essence, both Freeman and Blake are correct. Democrats will fall into a trap of their own making and maybe can’t even avoid it at this point. They will need Republicans to snatch them from the jaws of defeat … again.