As the 2024 election year inches closer, a number of polls released in recent days have raised questions about the chances of Joe Biden winning over voters to hold on to the keys to the White House for a second term.
The various surveys paint a picture of the incumbent president as unable to win over the electorate on key planks of his agenda, from his economic plans to tackle inflation, coping with illegal migration at the southern land border to appealing to younger voters.
Biden has also been
plagued by concerns about his age among the wider electorate. At 80, he is the oldest serving president in U.S. history, but has brushed off
questions about his physical and mental health, stating in 2022: "I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than a fly."
Biden's Disapproval Rating Hits All-Time High
A new
NBC poll, released on Saturday and conducted between September 15-19, found that the president's disapproval rating was at 56 percent—the highest it had recorded since tracking began when Biden took office in January 2021.
The latest polling aggregate gives Biden an overall approval rating of 41 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.6 percent—a few points lower than its worst last summer, though part of a consistent trend of being viewed as more unpopular than popular.
One Poll Puts Trump 10 Points Ahead
A
Washington Post/ABC poll released on Saturday, based on the responses of 1,006 U.S. adults surveyed between September 15-20, gave the president's likely 2024 rival
Donald Trump a 10 percent lead over Biden in a likely 2024 election match-up.
While the authors of the poll cautioned that it was likely an outlier—other recent national surveys putting the gap between Trump and Biden at around a percent either way—it comes as the president is facing a consistently low job approval rating since entering office.
Disapproval of his handling of the economy was at 64 percent, according to the
Post/ABC poll, while his response to the migration crisis at the southern border is at 62 percent. An Associated Press survey in August similarly gave him 36 percent approval on the economy.
Large Number of Democrats Would Vote for Rfk Jr. as a Third-Party Candidate
A third of Democratic voters said they would vote for
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he were to be unsuccessful in his party's primary battle and run as an independent in the 2024 presidential election, according to a recent study.
A Rasmussen Reports survey of 998 likely voters, conducted between September 17-18, found 57 percent of likely Democratic voters plan to support Biden in the Democratic primaries, while 25 percent would vote for Kennedy, three percent for
other hopeful Marianne Williamson and seven percent for any other candidate.
Kennedy Jr., the son of another presidential hopeful and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has emerged as
Joe Biden's closest challenger for the Democratic nomination since
announcing his White House bid in April, though Biden is widely seen as the presumptive nominee.
Biden's Support Plummeting With Black Voters, His Historic Base
The same NBC poll that gave Biden his worst disapproval rating also
showed growing dissatisfaction among Black voters over his performance during his first term. His job approval rating slipped from 80 percent in 2021 to 63 percent among Black voters—though it also found 76 percent would still vote for him come 2024.
While Biden maintains overall support among Black voters, other surveys have provided evidence to suggest a disconnect with the younger generation. One found that just 20.9 percent of those aged 18-49 wanted him to run for a second term.
A Democratic candidate for president has traditionally needed the Black vote to win. When Biden ran in 2020, he attracted 92 percent of the Black vote, compared to just eight percent for Trump, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Party's Own Voters Think It's Veered Too Far to the Left
A Morning Consult poll conducted between August 29 and September 1 and released Monday found, by a nine-point margin, that voters believe the
Democrats are more ideologically extreme than
Republicans.
Analysis of the results of the survey by the pollsters said the trend was being "largely driven by worsening perceptions among its own voter base."
"President Biden entered office pledging to go big on government in the vein of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and while some of his most ambitious plans such as Build Back Better were ultimately pared down, Democrats have still spent a ton of money to provide new benefits for Americans," Cameron Easley, a Morning Consult political analyst,
previously told Newsweek. "So, some of this may well just be a case of voters believing what Democrats are telling them."
He suggested that Biden was likely one of the main reasons the Democrats were being viewed as having stagnated more since 2020 than any other party.
A slew of recent surveys have thrown the possibility of the incumbent president easily gliding towards a second term into question.
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