WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has had a tough couple of weeks in polls, deepening the anxiety among his fellow Democrats about his age, political liabilities and the prospect that he could lose a rematch with former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s allies pooh-pooh the grim talk. Presidents Clinton and Obama both had miserable polls in the fall of their third years and bounced back to win reelection, they note. Polls a year out from an election have little if any ability to predict the outcome, they add.
On both counts, they’re right — up to a point.
Obama’s standing at this point in his tenure wasn’t very different from Biden’s today and caused a level of Democratic anxiety that, in hindsight, sounds very familiar. Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, went so far as to commission a poll to see if Obama would do better if he dumped his vice president, Biden, and replaced him with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — a surefire winner, some believed back then.
History never entirely repeats itself, however. Biden faces problems his predecessors did not. His age is one. Societywide trauma lingering from the COVID-19 pandemic is another.
Whether Biden can overcome those problems isn’t knowable. But we can know how his campaign intends to try. The strategy is already visible in his campaign speeches. It has a lot to do with getting voters to focus on Trump.
The election landscape one year out
The last two presidential elections were close: In 2016, Trump won an electoral college majority by carrying three key states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — by just under 80,000 votes. In 2020, Biden won his three closest states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by 44,000.
Maybe 2024 will be different, but it’s a safer bet to assume next year will be close as well. Those same five states, plus Nevada, will be the main arenas for competition.
It’s also a safe bet that few people who voted for Trump or Biden in 2020 will change their minds. Out of 158 million who voted, some will switch sides, but switching is rare. What’s far more likely to decide the election is who turns out and who stays home.
That’s where Biden’s vulnerability lies. Recent polls have shown a consistent pattern of Democratic groups souring on Biden’s presidency. That includes younger voters, Latino voters and younger Black voters, especially younger Black men.
Discontent on the left over Biden’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas has also created weakness among progressive voters.
Our most recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll of California voters illustrated that pattern, which also shows up in polls of swing states: 1 in 4 voters who said they cast ballots for Biden in 2020 now give him a negative job approval rating, the poll found. Latino voters, who were evenly split on Biden’s job performance in a previous poll in May, now disapprove of his work by 14 points, 55% to 41%.
That doesn’t mean that young voters or voters of color are ready to turn to Trump. The Berkeley IGS poll showed no sign of an increase in Trump support. It does mean that some significant share of those voters could decide to sit the election out.
Biden’s goal
A reelection campaign has three main goals: Boost the incumbent’s approval rating; get voters to focus on the challenger’s flaws; and win over some share of the voters who express mild disapproval.
The classic example of achieving the first goal was President Reagan’s “Morning in America” reelection campaign. In January 1983, Reagan’s approval stood at 35% in Gallup’s polling. By Election Day 1984, it had risen to 61%.
But Reagan’s campaign had a strong breeze to fly on — the economy began growing quickly at the start of 1982, coming out of a sharp recession. More than a year of growth with low inflation had already occurred before the campaign began.
Biden’s White House has tried to point to good economic news: Administration officials have spent the last year going across the country to tout historic lows in unemployment, new investments in roads, bridges, rail lines and other infrastructure, and efforts to boost renewable energy, all under the label of Bidenomics.
But real wages for most Americans have only recently started to rise, memories of the high inflation of 2022 remain fresh and the Bidenomics campaign hasn’t accomplished much. A poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University found that just 37% of voters approved of Biden’s handling of the economy; 59% disapproved.
If inflation continues to moderate and growth persists, the economy could look better to voters next year. But Biden faces an additional force pulling down his approval, polling analyst Natalie Jackson argues.
“There’s a big reason that the relationships between Americans’ economic attitudes, macroeconomic conditions, and political outcomes don’t look like they used to: It’s the pandemic, stupid,” Jackson wrote this week. Americans have tried to put the pandemic behind us, and discussion of it has largely fallen out of public discourse, but we remain “a society traumatized” by the vast social upheaval it caused, she wrote.
The impact can be seen in higher stress levels that Americans report, greater levels of negativity and lower levels of trust. It would be unusual if those factors weren’t also having an effect on politics.
A choice, not a referendum
But low levels of approval might not turn into votes against the incumbent. Voters who intensely dislike Biden almost surely will vote against him, but a crucial share of disapproval isn’t that strong. In Quinnipiac’s poll, for example, about 1 in 8 independent voters said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden’s job performance.
In the 2022 midterm elections, roughly 10% of voters said they “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s work, and Democrats narrowly won a majority of their votes, according to network exit polls. Winning that group in a midterm was unusual, but doing so again may be necessary for Biden.
That will require getting voters to focus on the opponent, much as Obama succeeded in getting voters in 2012 to focus on the downsides of his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
Trump, of course, has huge negatives available to exploit — and that’s even before the criminal trials that probably will dominate much of the election year.
At a Veterans Day campaign event in New Hampshire, the former president held forth for an hour and 45 minutes, referring to his opponents as “vermin” whom he vowed to “root out,” calling himself a “proud election denier” and promising to “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if reelected. Notably, although much of what Trump said was ad-libbed, those lines each appeared to be part of the prepared remarks he read off a TelePrompter.
Biden focused on those comments during a campaign speech he gave Tuesday at a fundraiser in San Francisco.
“Our very democracy is at stake because the same man who proclaimed himself to be a ‘proud election denier’ … is running on a platform to end democracy as we know it, and he’s not even hiding the ball,” Biden said. Trump’s remark about vermin, he added, “echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s.”
Throughout Trump’s political career, he’s done best when news coverage focused on his opponent, as it did on Clinton during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. He loves the spotlight, but tends to repel voters when he’s in it. For Biden, keeping the attention focused on Trump may provide a fruitful path toward recovery. Whether that will work is not something a poll taken today can predict.
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