A New York Times columnist wrote in a recent piece that President Joe Biden is so unpopular he could “easily” lose to former President Donald Trump in 2024.
“Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024,” Ross Douthat wrote in a September 9 piece. “[I]t’s been hard to distill a singular explanation for what’s kept his numbers lousy,” he added.
In the piece, titled, “Why is Joe Biden So Unpopular?” he cited potential reasons — persistent inflation and a far-left activist core of the Democrat Party pushing socially conservative minorities away — before settling on the issue of Biden’s age and lack of vigor.
He wrote:
[M]aybe the big problem is just simmering anxiety about Biden’s age. Maybe his poll numbers dipped first in the Afghanistan crisis because it showcased the public absenteeism that often characterizes his presidency. Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there’s just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage.
He said since there is no way to elevate a different leader with the same policies who might be more popular, “all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.”
He wrote, however, it would be difficult for Biden, 80, to lift the “pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.”
He said Biden cast himself as a transitional figure to a “more youthful and optimistic future,” but that optimism in a brighter future is lacking, and he doubted Biden would be able to inspire it.
“But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself,” he wrote.
My Sunday column: Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?: https://t.co/7pvVygFau5
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 10, 2023
On Sunday, Biden held a press conference in Vietnam where he rambled, shouted at reporters, and then told them he was “going to bed.”
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