Not to keep harping on President Biden’s bad poll numbers but some of the data coming out is truly something historic. This isn’t just a distaste among the general electorate for Biden’s presidency and policies, the sour feelings have morphed into a full-on revolt among Democrats truly desiring to replace Biden with practically anyone else in 2024.
The Washington Post calls it “unprecedented territory” for a party to so widely disdain its own president to the point where a vast majority of Democratic voters say Biden should not, under any circumstances, be the nominee in 2024:
Democratic voters say by more than 2 to 1 that they would prefer someone else as their nominee in 2024. Fully 64 percent say they would prefer to nominate someone not named Biden, while 26 percent want him as their nominee again.
There is very little if any precedent for this in recent political history.
The writing has been on the wall on this for a while. Even when Biden was very popular among Democrats (85 percent approval) and not quite as unpopular overall late last year, a poll still showed a plurality of Democratic-leaning voters preferred someone else as their 2024 nominee. And as Biden’s numbers have continued to decline — his approval rating is at 33 percent overall in the NYT/Siena poll — his party’s desire to renominate him has accordingly fallen.
This response must partly be due to a perception that regardless of what Democratic voters think of Joe Biden personally, he’ll get destroyed in 2024 by just about any Republican, including Donald Trump. Then consider if the GOP nominates someone without Trump’s baggage, the clobbering could be even worse sending Democrats into a deep minority for years to come.
This chart really puts things into perspective demonstrating just how little Democrats regard their Biden’s job as President:
Former President Bill Clinton is the only president in recent history that comes anywhere close to Biden’s numbers in 1995, likely a result of Republicans sweeping the House in 1994. In that sense, Biden could still see a path to re-election but Joe Biden is not Bill Clinton.
After the shellacking of 1994, Clinton eventually tacked to the center, signed several popular bills passed by the GOP-controlled House, and went on to defeat Bob Dole, a very weak Republican presidential nominee in 1996.
Biden has shown zero interest in tacking to the center and even less of an ability to charm his way out of a paper bag. Again, Bill Clinton had a connection with voters like Obama and Trump had in a way that Biden never has.
Even at his most unpopular, Republicans never displayed doubts about re-nominating Donald Trump in 2020:
Neither Trump nor President Barack Obama saw supporters of their party ever entertain such a desire to turn the page. Whenever the question was asked about them, at least two-thirds said they wanted to renominate the incumbent president. (Even when Trump was highly unpopular overall, about 8 in 10 Republicans wanted to renominate him.) Biden, by contrast, has seen nearly two-thirds of his party say they want someone else.
What went wrong in Biden’s presidency to make him so unpopular within his own party? Perhaps it’s an inability to move the ball in any direction. Biden has lost Republicans and independents by supporting left-wing progressive causes. However, Biden hasn’t made any progress there with almost all of his domestic legislative agenda getting killed in the Senate. As a result, progressives, who appreciate the words he uses, aren’t seeing any action.
Put this all together and you have a deeply unpopular president that appeals to very few groups and very few voters. He’s too progressive in what he supports, too abrasive in how he says things, too inept to get anything done, and too squishy for Democrats to support in the future.
In short, Biden’s political career is done culminating with a single term as president. It’s difficult if not impossible to see a scenario where Biden could run and win in 2024.
