At “President” Biden that is. The first mewling came at the end of 2022 when the primary MSM mouthpiece of the Democrats, the NYT, openly discussed Joe Biden’s lies about his business connections with his son, and then pointed out his “verbal fumbles” on a campaign stop. This opened the gates for the rest of the MSM to at least focus on some of Biden’s problems.
But they still suppressed themselves reporting on his biggest problems; the border and his clearly advancing senile dementia. In the last month the dams on both of those finally broke, with the former creating such severe problems in Democrat “Sanctuary Cities” like NYT and Chicago that their leaders are asking Biden for help, while the Hur report made it open season on Biden’s rotting old brain (“A sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”).
The mewling has now turned into a daily scream and to pile more problems onto Biden the opinion polls are now showing the impact of all this, and they also can no longer be ignored by the MSM, which in many cases are conducting them as they have to in an election year. The real question is how much of this screaming is their pain and how much is trying persuade Biden to quit?
Some points to keep in mind before looking at these polls.
First of all, national polls are not that useful in US Presidential races because it’s not a national vote but one conducted state-by-state. A national poll showing one candidate in the lead by 3-4 points does not necessarily translate into a similarly sized EC victory: for example, Reagan’s 1984 blowout of winning 49 states never showed him getting 98% of the vote. And the more recent results where the Democrat candidate has scored more votes nationwide than the Republican whether they won or lost.
As a result it’s those state polls, especially the ones in the swing states, that tell the real story of Presidential election success or failure. The Electoral College has 538 “voters” (hence 270 is the winning number), the number of voting representatives equalling the State’s House numbers plus their two Senators (So California with 53 House reps has 55 EC votes, the largest of any US State).
But National polls are still useful for showing the general mood of voters toward the candidates, especially when comparing flawed candidates like Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Biden, and especially over time. Moreover, they can poll issues that are national.
Finally, all polls are snapshots and what you really want is to see the same poll conducted over a period of months and two-three years because “the trend is your friend”. That can get a little tricky because thus far out from an election they’re still polling registered voters and it’s not until closer to the election that they begin to survey likely voters, which should also tell the tale of enthusiasm for the candidates but which makes a time-series tougher to compare.
To that end, before reading the following, you might to look at those State polls and Issue polls in a previous post, The Great 2024 US Election Bunfight: II – Biden & The Democrat Party.
So to the latest polls and the basic news is that things have got steadily worse for Biden across the board.
First, the CBS Survey has Biden down by four points against Trump (includes a 2.8-point margin of error) and the comparisons of the two men and their Presidencies are brutal for Biden (,ore at the link):
- Looking back at the Trump economy, 65% said it was good, and 28% said it was bad. That contrasts with their evaluation of Biden’s economy: 38% claim the current economy is good, while 59% accurately and honestly rate it as bad.
- Looking back at the Trump presidency, 46% say it was excellent or good. 53% say it was fair or poor. Biden fares much worse: 33% say it’s excellent or good, and 67% say it is fair or poor.
That’s part of the problem the Democrats face compared to 2016; voters already experienced a Trump Presidency and can’t be scared by talk of tanking stock markets, recession and war if he’s elected and they can’t sell Biden as being better on those fronts. They also can’t sell the 2020 argument about America no longer being “embarrassed” and “a laughing stock” under Biden, not with this:
Or this:
Second, Fox News has Biden down by two points against Trump, but given the MOE that’s basically a tie. It has some different interesting stuff:
Trump’s advantage comes from record or near-record support among key Democratic groups, while maintaining strong support among his own constituencies.
For instance, 28% of Black voters support Trump in the head-to-head against Biden, 7 times as many as supported him four years ago (4% in February 2020). In addition, Trump has significant support among voters under age 30 (51%) and Democrats (8%), with near-record support among Hispanics (48%) and suburban women (43%).
That last is interesting given that suburban woman are held to be Trump’s greatest weakness, especially with abortion still being the Democrats number one issue and about the only major issue where Biden beats Trump. It may be the economic pain on household budgets that’s doing it for Trump with woman voters?
But the real blows have come from the NYT, because they did three successive dumps of polling. The first showed Biden down by five points against Trump, which led to a lot of copium from Democrats as they argued about things like the cross-tabs (Woman, Blacks, Hispanics, etc) being out-of-whack.
Even couching the question in terms of age was not fooling anybody: everyone knows that the real question is senility or if you, “cognitive ability”.
The third and final added new views of the doom gathering around Biden, which is that more voters like Trump’s policies and record better than Biden’s – and presented graphically just to make it more obvious:
In terms of trends then these are the things to note from all these national polls.
- Biden was leading in these polls for a long time but has shown a steady decline and is now behind in almost all of them.
- The reason is that he’s been declining on and is now behind on almost all the big issues: the economy (people’s personal pain trumps GDP data), the Southern border and illegal immigration, the country going in the right direction (only one in four voters think it is), and handling the job of President, among others.
- That’s adding up to a decline in his personal popularity. He’s slipped a lot compared to 2020, and again it’s the steadiness of the decline that shows it’s not a one-off. Trump has never been popular but it’s hardly shifted in years.
- Trump’s strength with Black and Hispanic voters compared to previous GOP candidates was noted in 2016, he improved upon that in 2020 and seems to be strengthening. It’s long been understood by both Democrats and Republicans that the former need their share of the Black vote to stay around 90% to continue winning Presidential elections so this is a huge problem for Biden.
- Trump’s support among Republican voters (97%) plus their enthusiasm to vote is much stronger than Biden with Democrats (83%) and their enthusiasm. Hard to turn that around except by fear-mongering.
All this caused one of the NYT faithful, Ezra Klein, whom I respect as a fairly sharp Lefty analyst (but with the usual TDS hysteria), to write a long, blunt and painful article asking not whether Biden could do the job of President but whether he’s even capable of running for President?
Ya think?
But if you think any of this is causing Biden and his team to re-think things, let alone quitting the race, well….
The Biden team views the very question as absurd. The president in their view has an impressive record of accomplishment to run on. There is no obvious alternative. It is far too late in the cycle to bow out without considerable disruption…. And other than someone with Biden in their name, it is hard to imagine who would have enough influence to even broach the idea with him, much less sway him.
Looks like it’s going to be J6 “Insurrection”, “Threat To Democracy” and abortion all the way to November.
No Minister 
Tom, Where does Liz Cheney fit into this mess? Cheers
Nowhere – or working with the Democrats. In 2022 she got the boot from her Wyoming House seat, the seat her Dad once held, by 30 points (see the post O-Bitch-uary), and she’s more despised in the wider GOP than she was by her electors.
Cheney, Murkowski (Alaskan Senator), Romney and McCain and a bunch of others – including McConnell – were on one side of a civil war that is now over, and they’ve lost.
After 2020 they thought that not only was Trump gone but all his Deplorable voters, and things would go back to normal, with a future Bush-type presidency at some point.
They just never realised that Trump was merely a symbol; a whole new chunk of voters, including much of the former Democrat working class/union members, plus other former Dems, are now in the GOP camp – and they do not like the Cheney’s, Bushes and the rest.