On the menu today: A new survey in the key swing state of Georgia finds Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by eight percentage points, offering further evidence that the Biden campaign and Democrats ought to be sweating. The national polling looks really grim for Biden, too — he’s showing surprisingly weak numbers not just among independents, but among women, blacks, Hispanics, and college graduates. Vast swaths of demographics that the Democratic Party is used to winning by a wide margin sound like they’re ready to give up on Joe Biden.
Biden’s Abysmal Polling Numbers
Today, I head to Atlanta to speak before the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. I will be heading to a state that Donald Trump won by about five percentage points in 2016, lost narrowly in 2020, and is leading over Biden, 45 percent to 37 percent, in the latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll:
The poll showed nearly 20% of Georgians weren’t ready to support either candidate as the presidential race shifts from Iowa after Trump’s dominant victory Monday in the first nominating contest of the 2024 election cycle.
Biden is hurt by soft support among many Democratic and independent voters who were crucial to his narrow 2020 victory over Trump in Georgia, including 10% of Black voters who say they don’t plan to vote in the White House race at all.
Compounding Biden’s struggles in Georgia are his low approval ratings. About 62% of registered voters are critical of the president’s job performance, and a slim majority say they “strongly disapprove” of the Democrat.
The president’s backing among independents is dismal, with only 37% giving him favorable reviews compared with 54% who disapprove of his performance. And Black voters, the party’s most loyal constituency, are split over his handling of the nation’s top office.
You have to look at the survey itself to get those specific numbers; 45.5 percent of blacks say they approve of the job Biden is doing, 44.1 percent say they disapprove, and 10.4 percent say they don’t know. When asked whom they would vote for in November, 58.6 percent of blacks said Biden, 20.4 percent said Trump, 2.6 percent volunteered some other candidate who wasn’t listed as an option, 10.2 percent said they would not vote in the presidential election — which was volunteered, not listed as an option! — and 8.2 percent said they didn’t know.
That is about as big and loud a warning klaxon as the Democratic Party could imagine. In 2020, 88 percent of blacks voted for Biden; 11 percent voted for Trump. That’s a 30-percentage-point drop-off!
(Today, the Journal-Constitution released more results from that survey, and generally, the news is not good for Republicans, either: “Nearly two-thirds of Georgia voters said they oppose using public money to pay for private schools support, while more than two-thirds said they back expanding Medicaid eligibility.” So we can toss out the idea that this is some unusually heavily Republican-leaning or conservative poll sample. The primary problem of the Joe Biden campaign is Joe Biden.)
Nor are the national head-to-head numbers looking good for Biden. (Yes, we do not have a national popular vote right now, but if Biden loses the national popular vote in 2024, he is very likely to fall short of 270 electoral votes.) In the latest CBS News poll, Trump leads Biden, 50 percent to 48 percent. (Nikki Haley’s campaign would like to remind you that in the same survey, Haley leads Biden, 53 percent to 45 percent; Ron DeSantis leads Biden, 51 percent to 48 percent.) An Economist survey finds Trump and Biden tied (it only asked about the GOP front-runner). A Reuters survey also finds Trump and Biden tied, although at a surprisingly low 35 percent each. Thirty percent told the pollster “other” or “don’t know.”
Notice the AJC survey of Georgia has Biden at 37 percent, the Economist has Biden at 43 percent, and that Reuters survey has Biden at 35 percent. An incumbent president is the ultimate known quantity; he is the status quo.
Democrats should be worried. The Biden team and a certain number of high-profile Democrats believe that the nomination of Trump will be all they need to win a second term. And I should note my friend Andy McCarthy’s plausible belief that the media is not-so-subtly building up Donald Trump in the primary, so it can tear him down during the general election:
The Democrats know this because they’ve field-tested their strategy in election cycles since 2018: You work from winter into summer to get Trump-backed candidates nominated for state and federal offices, then you trounce those candidates when they run against Democratic nominees in the fall elections. The ultimate Trump-backed candidate is Trump himself, and the indictments have succeeded in ensuring that Republicans who would actually have had a decent shot at beating Biden got no traction.
But I don’t think the Democrats’ plan included Biden’s job approval tumbling to 33 percent, and only 57 percent of Democrats being satisfied with Biden as the nominee:
Among all adults, Biden’s approval rating is just 33% in this poll, worse than Trump’s low as president (36 percent) and the lowest since George W. Bush from 2006-2008. Fifty-eight percent disapprove of Biden’s work.
Among groups, just 31% of women now approve of Biden’s work in office, a new low (as do 34% of men). He won 57% of women in 2020.
He’s at 28% approval among independents, a customary swing voter group; a low of 32% among moderates; and a low of 41% among college graduates, 10 points off his career average in that group.
Further, Biden’s approval rating is 21 points below average among Black people and 15 points below average among Hispanic people, compared with 6 points among white people; more Black people, in particular, offer no opinion.
There’s a striking difference among Black people by age in their views of Biden: He has an approval rating of 65% among Black people age 50 and up, dropping sharply to 32% among Black people younger than 50. Age gaps are not apparent among white or Hispanic people.
And here’s a perfect irony: What if some of the efforts meant to undermine and hurt Trump are actually helping him?
Do you feel like you hear from Donald Trump as often as you used to? My guess is no. His angry rants on Truth Social don’t get nearly as much attention as when he was on Twitter.
Nate Silver observed that Trump’s favorable number is about four percentage points higher, and his unfavorable number is four or five points lower than two years ago. Silver concludes, “Trump is more popular than he’s been in a long while and it’s time to admit that ‘deplatforming’ him didn’t work.”
As our Jeff Blehar observes, “Those of us who still regularly read his TruthSocial posts — which are seen by almost nobody outside his committed base — suspect it may have, in fact, benefited him. A lot of people don’t realize he’s gotten *more* unhinged since 2020.”
When voters don’t hear from Trump, they aren’t reminded of all the crazy things he says. That frees up space for voters to remember what they like about Trump — the sense that the economy was thriving and wages were growing, that gas prices were comparatively low, that the border was comparatively secure and illegal immigration was declining, and that you never knew when an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander might end up a red smear on an Iraqi highway.
I don’t know if Donald Trump has the self-control to run a basement campaign and avoid saying crazy things. This morning on Truth Social, Trump shared a photoshopped image of Nikki Haley morphed into Hillary Clinton, and offered this commentary, with his usual insults and nicknames:
Anyone listening to Nikki “Nimrada” Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary. She didn’t, and she couldn’t even beat a very flawed Ron DeSanctimonious, who’s out of money, and out of hope. Nikki came in a distant THIRD! She said she would never run against me, “he was a great President,” and she should have followed her own advice. Now she’s stuck with WEAK POLICIES, and a VERY STRONG MAGA BASE, and there’s just nothing she can do!
It’s in the man’s DNA, or in his soul. (Perhaps you can take the man out of the borough of Queens, but you can’t take the Queens out of the man.) And when Trump is the nominee, you can safely bet that the mainstream media will be extremely interested in everything he posts on his Truth Social account.
But if Trump had even an ounce of self-control . . . this deeply troubled incumbent would likely be doomed.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday on Meet the Press Now:
Anchor Gabe Gutierrez: President Biden tweeted that ‘this election would always be you and me versus extreme MAGA Republicans.’ Does this message of us versus them really resonate considering he was talking about in 2020 that he would unite the country? Now he really is setting this up to be a battle between himself and Donald Trump. By the way, the Biden campaign is ignoring DeSantis and Haley completely. But… ‘us versus them.’ Will this work?
Me: What’s he going to run on, the border? Inflation? All these other issues and these terrible numbers?