WASHINGTON – In short, President Biden’s argument for running for a second term rather than ceding the floor to the next generation is that he is the most certain Democrat to beat former President Donald J. Trump in the year it comes.
But a surprising new poll challenged that case in a way that had much of the capital buzzing in recent days. Taken at face value, the poll showed Biden trailing Mr. Trump by six percentage points in a theoretical rematch, raising the question of whether the president is as well positioned as he claims.
No single poll means that much, especially this early in an election cycle, and the president’s strategists, as well as some independent analysts, questioned its methodology. But even if this is an outlier, other recent polls have indicated that the race is effectively tied, with either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump having narrow leads within the margin of error. Together, they suggest the president opens the 2024 campaign facing enormous challenges with no guarantee of victory over Trump.
The data has left many Democrats feeling anywhere from nauseous to alarmed. Mr. Biden’s case for being the safe pair of hands at a volatile time is undermined, in his view, if a president who passed major legislation and presides over the lowest unemployment in generations cannot overcome a doubly charged challenger who instigated an insurrection, has been charged. of multiple felonies, is in a civil suit accused of rape and faces more potential criminal charges in the coming months.
“The poll shows that the president still has work to do, not just to convince the American people that he is ready for the job he wants to complete,” said Donna Brazile, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee who said she lose sleep on the “ominous signs” of the latest survey results. “More importantly, it is a good foreshadowing of the challenges he will face in rebuilding the remarkable coalition that elected him in 2020.”
“I don’t think they should panic because you can’t panic after a survey,” said Ms. Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. One poll is “just one indicator” among many on the long road to the voting booth. “But it is an important barometer of where the electorate is today, some 547 days away from the November 2024 election.”
The poll by The Washington Post and ABC News found that the president’s approval rating has fallen to 36 percent and that Mr. Trump would win between 44 and 38 percent if the election were held today. Just as troubling for Democrats, pollsters rated Mr. Trump, 76, as physically and mentally fitter than Biden, 80, and concluded that the former president was managing the economy better than the incumbent.
Critics of the poll disparaged it for including all adults in its sample of 1,006, rather than just registered voters, and argued that its results among subgroups such as young people, independents, Hispanics and black Americans they were simply not believable.
“The poll is really garbage, and I don’t say that lightly because I’ve had respect for their polls in the past,” said Cornell Belcher, who was President Barack Obama’s pollster. “However, their methodological decision here is problematic,” he added about the way the survey was constructed.
Others cautioned against overanalyzing the data so soon, noting that anything can happen in the next 18 months and recalling that poll-based projections (or misinterpretations of polls) turned out to be poor predictors in recent cycles, including 2022 mid-term elections when “red” was predicted. wave” did not materialize.
“The May 2024 polls will be of dubious value,” said David Plouffe, who was Mr. obama “May 2023 polls worth as much as Theranos stock”.
The White House expressed no concern about the latest polls. “President Biden’s job approval rating is higher than it was in early November, when polling reports widely prophesied a supposedly inevitable red tide that never came,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said the president would win on issues such as reducing prescription drugs and protecting Social Security. “Americans voted for Joe Biden’s America in 2020 and 2022, and regardless of what the current Beltway says, they will do so again in 2024,” he said.
While not predictive, the recent polls provide a critical baseline at the start of a potential race between two universally known figures, foreshadowing a campaign without a clear leader. Surveys of Yahoo news, The Wall Street Journal i Morning consultation have found the president slightly ahead while polls by The Economist and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University found him tied or ahead by several points. Mr. Biden faces equally mixed results against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.
The results point to a calcification of American politics where leaders of both parties have a similar-sized core of support among voters who are not open to the other side, regardless of news developments. The days when presidents could enjoy an approval rating above 50 percent or double-digit leads over rivals for a sustained period of time appear to be over. And so, if widespread support can no longer be achieved, Mr. Biden’s challenge is to reassemble the coalition that gave him a 4.5 percentage point victory nearly three years ago.
Mr. Biden has dismissed the importance of the polls, saying he is no different from other presidents at this point in their terms. “Every major that won re-election, their poll numbers were where mine are,” he told Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” on Friday.
But in fact, only two of the last 13 presidents had lower approval ratings than Biden has right now, according to an aggregate compilation from FiveThirtyEight.com — Mr. Trump and Jimmy Carter both lost re-election. More encouraging for Mr. Biden is the example of Ronald Reagan, who was only a tenth of a point above where the current president is at this stage of his presidency, but came back to win a spectacular re-election in 1984.
Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant, said it indicated Mr. Biden was essentially tied to or behind “a former president who was carrying more baggage than a loaded 747” and warned Democrats against complacency.
“Democrats are in denial if they think Biden can’t lose to Trump in 2024,” he said. “Trump can certainly win. Joe Biden is asking the country to elect a candidate who will be 82 years old, who has clearly lost a step, running with a vice president that almost no one in either party thinks is ready for prime time “.
The Post-ABC poll and other polls also contain unpleasant news for Republicans. While Mr. Trump leads or remains relatively even with the president, he may have a ceiling beyond which he cannot climb, while Mr. Biden can still win over ambivalent independents who dislike the former president. analysts said.
“While the poll isn’t great news for Biden, it’s not great news for Republicans either,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. “Only a third say they are strong supporters of Biden, DeSantis and Trump. It feels more unsettling than anything else.”
He said the real choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, if it came to that, would force Democrats and ambivalent independents off the fence. “I noticed more softness among the Democrats, but I have no doubt that no matter how skeptical the Democrats tell the pollsters right now, they will vote for Joe Biden,” he said.
Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s campaign against Obama in 2012 and is a vocal critic of Mr. Trump noted that the Republican establishment is worried that the former president cannot win even though he is leading in some polls. “We seem to be in this weird moment where the Republican elite is panicking that Trump can’t beat Biden,” he said. “I think that’s because they know Trump is deeply flawed.”
David Axelrod, the former senior Obama adviser who was on the other side of Mr. Stevens, agreed with his assessment. “What Biden has that no one else does is a record of defeating Trump, which weighs heavily in conversations among Democrats about the race,” Axelrod said. “He also has a record to run and a party outside the mainstream on some big issues to run against, with a deeply flawed favourite.”
“The concern for Democrats is that re-election is subject to many variables that Biden cannot fully control, including his own health and aging process,” Mr. Axelrod added. “Any setbacks will exacerbate public concerns already seen in polls about their health and ability to handle another four years.”
