The incumbent president, according to an NBC News poll, can count on the support of just 41 percent of registered voters.
Joe Biden billed himself as a transitional figure in the 2020 presidential campaign — a generational “bridge” to a future full of Democrats that Americans don’t support and for whom they won’t vote. That is the conclusion we must draw given Biden’s reluctance to pass the baton.
“Mr. Biden likes to remind anyone who will listen that he is the only one who has beaten Mr. Trump,” the New York Times reported last autumn, “and he remains confident that he is the Democrat who is best equipped to do it again.” That sentiment appears to be gaining purchase among some influential Democrats, as the president gears up to launch his reelection campaign in the coming days. “Yeah, he’s old,” South Carolina Democrat Dick Harpootlian recently commented to the Washington Post. “But he’s only four years older than Trump, so less distinction there.”
Biden and his allies have established a tidal lock with Donald Trump. The metrics they cite to justify Biden’s successes are evaluated primarily in the ways they contrast with Trump’s record. Biden’s moribund poll numbers don’t seem so terrible compared with Trump’s. The president’s defenders respond to criticisms of their man in the White House in much the same way dutiful Soviet mothers scared their children to sleep at night: You wouldn’t want the Tsar to come back, would you?
Voters, it seems, are marginally more discerning than Joe Biden’s cheering section. When asked to evaluate the sitting president on the merits, voters don’t grade him on the curve established by his predecessor. For example, when voters were asked if Biden should run for president again, an NBC News survey published over the weekend found that fully 70 percent of all respondents and even a majority of self-described Democrats said no. By contrast, a comparatively respectable 60 percent would prefer to see him beg off another run at the White House, including just about one-third of the Republican primary electorate.
Joe Biden remains more well-liked than Trump — or, at least, is “viewed less negatively” than Trump, according to Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt. A Monday article in the Washington Post summed up the lukewarm support Biden generates within his party. Among the Democrats that Post reporters surveyed, Biden was “far from their first choice,” but they said he’s “the best option” to “prevent a second Donald Trump term or the ascent of another Trump-like politician.” Hardly a ringing endorsement.
This should trouble Democrats given the NBC News poll’s discovery that the incumbent president can count on the support of just 41 percent of registered voters compared with the 47 percent who say they would cast their ballot for “the eventual Republican nominee.”
True, Biden’s troubles are mainly owed to the number of Democrats who have soured on his performance in office and long for an alternative. They will likely come around to Biden when he is the Democratic nominee and after a polarizing general election campaign. But begrudging support is soft support. And it is conceivable that Republican primary voters will heed the warnings that suggest Trump is the GOP candidate most likely to lose a head-to-head race against Biden. But those warnings are increasingly muddled by head-to-head polling that suggests Biden is vulnerable to the “eventual Republican nominee” even if that nominee is Trump.
Biden’s defenders will insist that the president can run on his record against all Republican comers, but they haven’t displayed the courage of that conviction yet. Instead, the president’s allies comfort themselves with Trump’s unpopularity, even as voters sour on the economy, believe the nation is on the wrong track, and are increasingly down on Biden’s handling of his job. In candid moments, the president’s jittery supporters succumb to apoplexy over the idea that a third-party candidate might emerge to satisfy the desire among voters to see someone — anyone — consign these two relics to the political-history books. That, Biden’s defenders insist, would guarantee Trump’s reelection.
If the entrance of an alternative to Joe Biden guarantees his loss in next year’s general election, the blame for that will fall on Joe Biden.