In the latest polling numbers from ABC News and The Washington Post, former President Donald Trump tops President Biden by nine points in a head-to-head matchup.
As expected with numbers this bad for Biden, Democrats have been quick to criticize the poll as an “outlier” while Republicans have embraced it as further evidence of Biden’s eroding presidency.
Either way, it’s a whopper for Biden who also finds diminished trust from the American people overall and truly garbage ratings on the economy:
President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is 19 points underwater, his ratings for handling the economy and immigration are at career lows. A record number of Americans say they’ve become worse off under his presidency, three-quarters say he’s too old for another term and Donald Trump is looking better in retrospect — all severe challenges for Biden in his reelection campaign ahead.
Forty-four percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’ve gotten worse off financially under Biden’s presidency, the most for any president in ABC/Post polls since 1986. Just 37% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove. Still fewer approve of Biden’s performance on the economy, 30%.
On handling immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden’s rating is even lower, with 23% approval. In terms of intensity of sentiment, 20% strongly approve of his work overall, while 45% strongly disapprove. And the 74% who say he’s too old for a second term is up 6 percentage points since May. Views that Trump is too old also are up, but to 50% in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.
The numbers are primarily being driven down by Democrats annoyed with the current state of affairs in the country. Biden has been nothing short of a disaster in terms of the economy but also on a host of issues as outlined in the data above. From the border to the President’s job approval rating overall, few are impressed with what the Biden era has wrought.
As for the 2024 presidential election, Democrats would much prefer for Joe Biden to step aside before it’s too late:
A remarkable 62% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say the party should pick someone other than Biden as its nominee in 2024; just a third back Biden. Desire for a different candidate is at a numerical high, but also consistent with past results (56 to 58%) the past year.
Head-to-head in a hypothetical November 2024 matchup, Trump has 51% support while Biden has 42% — numerically up 3 points for Trump and down 2 points for Biden from an ABC/Post poll in February, shifts that are not statistically significant.
Before Republicans get gleeful over these numbers, it’s worth asking why they were ever released in the first place. Media companies conduct polling all the time, some of which never sees the light of day if it’s deemed too much of an outlier or merely too detached from mainstream conventional wisdom.
These numbers likely serve as a warning for Joe Biden that his time being propped up by the media will eventually come to an end. Biden’s ratings on the economy are a dumpster fire despite efforts to paint the economy with rose-colored glasses. The White House is taking on a tone of anger at the American people for simply not agreeing to see things the way the Biden administration wants them to be seen.
Unlike Barack Obama, a president for which the media would bend over backward to prop up on every issue, Joe Biden is disposable.
If mainstream media conglomerates start to see Joe Biden as the losing horse in 2024, they’ll push every lever they can to dump him for a better option rather than risk him losing soundly to Donald Trump.
This didn’t stop left-wing publications, such as Rolling Stone, from attacking the poll as an outlier while offering little evidence to support the claim:
While the ABC News/Post poll of just more than 1,000 registered voters showed Trump with a wide lead against Biden, other polls have tended to show a neck-and-neck race, with the NBC poll having the pair tied at 46 percent.
As to the potential causes of such an “outlier,” the order of questions in the ABC News/Post poll could be one, according to public opinion researcher Gary Langer. (Respondents were first asked about a variety of topics, such as the economy, many of which showed poor results for Biden).
Voters could also just be sending a message, Langer explained.
“It’s best seen as an opportunity for the public to express its like or dislike of the candidates,” he wrote. “Biden is broadly unpopular and doubts about his suitability for a second term are extensive; wherever they end up in more than a year, a substantial number of Americans today are taking the opportunity to express their displeasure.”
So if Americans are expressing their like or dislike of candidates and Joe Biden is on the losing end of that expression, the poll must be an outlier according to Rolling Stone. There’s simply no conceivable way that voters are now considering how much better off they were during the Trump years and finding that Biden’s campaign promises weren’t worth the air into which they were uttered.
The Biden administration is a sinking ship politically, the rats will start abandoning it soon.
