Democrats have a lot of reasons to be panicking right now. The 2024 election is anything but decided – hell, it’s not even 2024 yet – but the increasing negatives surrounding Joe Biden and his administration are becoming too hot for the Democratic Party to have an answer for.
The polling when it comes to Biden has been less than stellar, and it’s not new. It’s been in trouble since the Afghanistan withdrawal two years ago, but it’s tanked in recent months. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll seems to confirm that the bad times are here to stay.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s chances of re-election are being jeopardized by voters’ concerns over his age, the economy and crime, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, creating an opportunity for Republican challenger Donald Trump to return to the White House.
The opinion poll found Democrat Biden, 80, tied in a hypothetical November 2024 election against Trump, 77, the former president who is the front-runner for the Republican nomination, with both receiving 39% of the vote and one in five voters undecided.
But in a worrisome result for Biden, Trump held a small advantage in the seven states where the 2020 presidential election was closest: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada and Michigan. In those states, Trump led with 41% to Biden’s 35%, and 24% undecided.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online nationwide from Sept. 8 through Sept. 14, gathering responses from 4,413 U.S. adults. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 2 percentage points.
And things don’t get any better.
Biden faces the risk of losing independent voters, whom he won decisively in 2020. If the election were held now, Trump had 32% support among independents to Biden’s 30%, effectively a tie with the a 38% plurality still undecided, the poll found.
Biden held an early advantage among voters who said they were completely certain they would vote next year – they favored the Democrat 49%-38% with just 13% undecided. Since his 2020 loss, Trump has continued to falsely claim that his defeat was the result of fraud, which could serve to undercut some of his supporters’ faith in the electoral process.
Biden is suffering terrible polling primarily because of his age and the economy, but those aren’t the only problems. Checking in with the RealClearPolitics polling averages, his approval on a host of issues is just abysmal.
- Economy: 37/59.4
- Inflation: 32.6/63.6
- Immigration: 33.3/61.2
- Crime: 35/57.3
- Foreign Policy: 40.2/56.2
It’s a big deal to have such an unpopular guy going into a re-election bid. These numbers are catastrophic, and while the country is on the verge of an economic recession, a high-profile crime wave, a crisis at the southern border, and more, Biden appears to be doing less than nothing. It’s got to have the Democrats in a bad mood.
It’s not just Biden, however. Vice President Kamala Harris has long been suffering from terrible polling and optics. High-profile Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, won’t commit to saying she’s the best person for the job. Jamie Raskin refused four times to say it.
FULL EXCHANGE: Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin refuses — FOUR TIMES — to say if he believes Kamala Harris is Biden's best choice for vice president pic.twitter.com/ogTVKFf3nm
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 14, 2023
This might just be the least popular tag team we’ve ever seen. Biden’s best-case scenario is tying Trump in a general election, but his worst-case scenario is running against any of the other candidates, all of whom are frequently shown beating Biden in a head-to-head match-up. He could maybe do better if his second-in-command wasn’t so disliked. His age means she is one heartbeat away from being the president and considering her run for president in 2020 was slightly longer than Aaron Rodgers’ run as the starting quarterback for the Jets, it’s pretty clear the American people have known for a while they’d prefer literally anyone else at the helm but her.
I wouldn’t want to be a Democrat looking ahead at 2024 right now. Trump might be their best hope for keeping power, if the polling stands up, but it’s far from a sure bet. And while the Democrats put on brave faces on the outside, there has to be a lot of crying behind closed doors these days.