If it's an incumbent president running for a second term, it's a referendum on him (or perhaps, in the future, her).
If it's an "open" election, it's a referendum on the outgoing president by proxy, the proxy being his party's new nominee (who often has been vice-president for four or eight years).
Joe Biden has that problem: The 2024 presidential election is a referendum on him, his policies, whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago, etc.
BUT!
Normally that problem redounds to the benefit of the non-incumbent challenger. He or she has no past presidential record to defend, just future policies to promise and the ability to selectively compare himself or herself to the more popular past presidents of the same party.
This year, we effectively have two incumbents.
Yes, Donald Trump has been out of office since 2021, but he's been president before, so he has a record up for a second referendum.
Furthermore, he's remained by far the most dominant voice for and of his party. He exercises considerable influence over, and can be tagged with, pretty much everything his co-partisans in Congress have done (and all the bizarre stuff his endorsees did in 2022 to destroy a supposedly inevitable "red wave") while he's been on vacation.
It's not that Biden doesn't have a "referendum on the incumbent" problem. But the differential between him and his challenger on incumbency problems is much smaller than usual.
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