President Joe Biden speaks from the Oval Office of the White House Oct. 19, 2023, in Washington, about the war in Israel and Ukraine. The president’s approval rating was a record-low 34% in a Monmouth University poll, 37% in a New York Times/Siena College survey, and 38% in a Quinnipiac University poll, all released last week. He trails former President Donald Trump by 2.6 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
AP file photo
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WASHINGTON — The polls haven’t been good to Joe Biden.
The president’s approval rating was a record-low 34% in a Monmouth University poll, 37% in a New York Times/Siena College survey, and 38% in a Quinnipiac University poll, all released last week. He trails former President Donald Trump by 2.6 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
“The optics of the incumbent now on the downside of a neck-and-neck race against an opponent taking legal fire from all corners can’t be good,” Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said.
Majorities of Americans disapprove of the way Biden is handling issues such as the economy, immigration, crime, inflation, and foreign policy. Three-quarters of voters in an earlier Monmouth poll said the president, 81, is “too old to effectively serve another term.”
In Pennsylvania — the most populous battleground state in the country and probably a must-win for either party — polls show Biden and Trump in a dead heat, even after the former president’s four indictments on 91 criminal charges.
Should Biden be worried?
“The short answer is absolutely, he should be,” said Christopher Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. “Biden and his team should certainly be concerned about the status of the overall race and the status of Pennsylvania. Despite some of the advantages of incumbency, the polls right now show him with lots of challenges. At the same time, people who might be writing a political obituary right now are certainly premature.”
With 11 months until Election Day, Democrats have yet to reach for the Maalox.
“Democrats should be concerned but not panicked,” said former U.S. Rep. Paul McHale, D-Pa. “The time between now and the 2024 election is an eternity. There are so many things that can change, not only in the next few months but in the last few days. You have to play the long game.”
To a person, Democratic officials and strategists say there’s plenty of time to change the narrative.
“I don’t worry too much about poll numbers a year from the election,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of Biden’s campaign advisory board. “I know that this town is constantly of the belief that the election cycle is endless. I don’t believe that. I think campaigns happen for a reason.”
After all, a September 2011CNN poll gave then-President Barack Obama a 43% approval rating, just one point higher than his all-time low. Obama went on to win re-election the following year with 51% of the vote.
“They said similar things about Obama,” said Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., another member of Biden’s campaign advisory committee. “Once it settles down and (voters know) who the opponent’s going to be, it will be such a clear contrast.”
Democratic strategists say giving Biden low approval ratings offers an opportunity for Americans to vent at a time of war and with prices that remain elevated from pre-pandemic levels even as inflation has dropped sharply.
“A blind person can see there’s frustration out there,” said one of them, Modia Butler.
A Western Pennsylvania Republican congressman countered by saying Biden’s poll ratings reflect bad policies, not a bad mood.
“That’s really reverse thinking,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler. “Biden’s numbers are bad because people see the economy is bad. They’re the opposite of the Midas touch — everything they touch turns to lead.”
Three in 10 Americans in a Marist Poll released last week said they expected their financial situation to get worse — the highest percentage in 14 years.
“President Biden needs to convince more Americans that his economic policies are working,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.
Democrats say that’s what they’re working on, and the numbers will change once Americans start paying attention to the 2024 presidential race.
“Democrats have a great story to tell — on jobs, infrastructure, health care rights,” Democratic consultant Mike Soliman said. “Inflation is down, unemployment is low, and Joe Biden is leading the biggest infrastructure investment in a generation.”
That political sales pitch is underway.
Last month, administration officials used the third anniversary of the president’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law to tout how it already was funding 40,000 projects. He traveled to Nevada on Dec. 8 to announce $8.2 billion from the infrastructure law for passenger rail (including $143.6 million to improve the tracks between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg to add a second daily Amtrak train along that route). And he went to Philadelphia on Dec. 11 to announce a $22 million federal grant to provide salaries and benefits for 72 firefighters.
“I’m glad to see him out on the campaign trail talking directly to people,” Titus said.
Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said in a four-page memo last week that the president “has amassed one of the most impactful legislative records in generations.” He ticked off 52 accomplishments, including capping the cost of insulin, lowering health care costs, and building new high-speed internet connections.
Touting that record also is essential to shore up backing from constituencies who are key to Biden’s prospects in 2024, supporters said.
Take Black voters, for example. When Biden won the Keystone State in 2023 by just 50% to 49%, he received 92% of the Black vote while Trump received 7%, according to CNN exit polls.
But in an October New York Times-Siena College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania and five other battleground states, only 64% of Black voters said they would support Biden for re-election, while 23% said they would support the Republican nominee. And a Muhlenberg College survey of Pennsylvania voters put Biden ahead among people of color by only 52% to 29% in a hypothetical rematch of 2020.
“It’s an anchor right now on his chances,” Borick said. “It’s such a key constituency for Democrats that if you’re not performing at real dominant levels, it raises your challenge enormously.”
This comes after Biden nominated the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He backed efforts to expand voting rights that unanimously were opposed by Republicans in the House and blocked by GOP members in the Senate. And his infrastructure law includes funding to reconnect minority communities severed by expressways decades ago.
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, the first Black senator from New Jersey and a member of Biden’s advisory committee, said that when he listed Biden’s accomplishments before a largely Black audience in South Carolina, “you just saw a sea change of enthusiasm. And the call wasn’t, ‘What’s Biden done for our community?’ It was, ‘God, we need to get this word out more.’”
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist from South Carolina, said the campaign needs to ratchet up those efforts,
“We have to break the speed limit here,” he said. “Sometimes we just need a little tap on the shoulder as a reminder.
Biden traveled to Wisconsin on Wednesday and visited the Milwaukee Black Chamber of Commerce to tout his administration’s efforts in funding Black-owned businesses.
“We always believed diversity is our strength as a nation,” Biden said. “The economy and our nation are stronger when we’re tapped into the full range of talents in this nation.”
That same Times-Siena poll showed Biden trailing a generic Republican candidate among voters under 30, 48% to 40%. Biden carried that age group last time by 62% to 35% in Pennsylvania, according to CNN exit polls.
And Biden’s support for Israel and its military campaign in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas threatens to be another flashpoint with younger Americans. Only 21% of those aged 18 to 34 approved of Biden’s handling of the war in a Quinnipiac poll released last week. Almost three-quarters, 72%, disapproved, higher than any other age group.
“The Democratic Party has a growing fissure between its younger cohort and its older cohort based on supporting Israel in their war against Hamas,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Harrisburg-based GOP consultant. “That’s not anything they can do something about because Biden is who he is on that issue.”
While inflation continues to drop — it was 3.1% in November, down from 9.1% in June 2022 — prices still remain above pre-pandemic levels. Kelly says he does the food shopping in his family, and when he goes into a supermarket, he sees “people picking up products and putting them back down because it’s too expensive.”
Daniel Hornung, deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council, acknowledged that “folks across the country are still frustrated with high prices,” but said that was changing. He highlighted Biden’s ongoing efforts to reduce costs, including lower drug prices and health premiums, and reducing the so-called junk fees added to airline fares and concert tickets.
“We’re seeing real progress on bringing costs down, on bringing inflation down,” Hornung said, noting it was done without the recession and a spike in unemployment that many economists predicted.
The problem for the president is all that talk has yet to resonate with the public, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.
“There is political danger in pushing a message that basically tells people their take on their own situation is wrong,” Murray said.
Looming over the campaign is the growing likelihood that Trump will win his party’s nomination, even with multiple criminal trials to come.
“In a conventional election cycle, you’d be very worried with polling numbers for an incumbent that are not good,” said Vince Galko, a Republican consultant in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
But Biden likely will face “the “most polarizing individual in American political history” in Trump, Galko said, and “the Democrats’ grassroots machine is so superior to Republicans that they’re overcoming deficiencies in their candidates and the environment.”
And outrage over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has mobilized supporters of abortion rights and allowed Democrats to beat expectations in recent elections. As president, Trump fulfilled his campaign promise by nominating three of the justices who voted to overturn the decision after almost a half-century.
Democrats say they like their prospects if the former president is renominated, especially as Trump has increasingly deployed authoritarian rhetoric — saying he’d only be a dictator on “day one,” vowing to “root out” political opponents who he described as “vermin,” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase similar to one used by Adolf Hitler.
Just last week, the Biden campaign went after Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment — his $2 trillion tax cut, which gave 65% of its benefits to the richest 20% of U.S. households, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group. Biden’s 2021 stimulus law, by contrast, gave 69% of its tax benefits to the bottom 60%.
“I don’t think at this moment the American people are focused on the very stark choice they have before them,” said Butler, the Democratic strategist. “Once that choice is put in front of people, Biden will be OK.”
While Trump, at 77, is only four years younger than Biden, “for now, because Biden is president, that issue is hitting him harder,” Nicholas said.
Just running against Trump won’t be enough, said McHale, the former Democratic congressman.
“The president and the administration have to present themselves as the sober alternative to chaos,” he said. “The president should stake out a series of policy objectives that would establish where he wants to go following his re-election.