That's simply not true.
By late 1983, Reagan had recovered (1). As you said, HW was ahead because of the war -- the only case where there was a reversal of the polling from one year out. Clinton was ahead all the way through (2). Bush was ahead because of war and would stay ahead. Obama was ahead, as I showed. Trump was behind, and he lost.
Finally, wealso have approval ratings, which turned out to be very significant in 2016, and are historically off-the-scale bad for Biden:
(1) - while it is hard to get 1v1 polling, his approval had recovered at this point from a low of under 40 earlier in 1983, to approaching 55:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/ronald-reagan-public-approval
(2) -
wiki : "Clinton maintained a consistent polling edge over Dole, and he won re-election with a substantial margin in the popular vote and the
Electoral College. "
Individual poll from Dec 1995: " 50 percent of respondents said they would support Bill Clinton, just 32 percent Bob Dole. The average of recent polls has Clinton ahead by 10-12 points. "