Some Democrats and their allies in the establishment media appear panicked that polling trends show President Joe Biden bleeding support from key demographics just six months away from Election Day.
Numerous recent polls show Biden lost support among demographics key to his 2020 victory:
- NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist: A majority of independent voters believe Biden is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.
- ABC News/Ipsos: Trump is in a dead heat with Biden among suburban women.
- USA Today/Suffolk University: Among Hispanics, Trump leads Biden by five points (39-34 percent).
- Wall Street Journal: 30 percent of black men and 11 percent of black women intend to vote for Trump.
- New York Times: Trump and Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds.
“It should be a wake-up call,” CNN’s Van Jones said this week. “Young people are upset. And it’s not just the situation in Gaza — the economic prospects for young people are miserable.”
Philoria Richemond of Miami waits in an auditorium for her number to be called at a jobs fair (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky).
“We just do not have a pathway for young people to be able to pay off their student debt, get a house,” he added. “I think that we’re not yet feeling, hearing a full-throated approach to the young people [from Biden]. There’s a symbolic piece around student loans. That’s not going to be enough for Joe Biden.”
Fareed Zakaria, a CNN anchor and Biden favorite, implored Biden to be “honest about reality” due to voter sentiment and Trump’s appeal to voters:
Polling “is rightly causing panic among Democrats,” Alex Shephard of The New Republic reported. “Voters know Joe Biden—and they’ve decided that they don’t think he’s capable of doing the job of president for a second term.”
“It’s hard to see how Biden can turn around this perception of him, however,” Shephard continued. “He will not be any younger on Election Day, and there’s not a lot he can do to combat concerns about his age.”
Meanwhile, Biden does not believe the negative surveys are accurate, and neither do many of his advisers, according to people familiar with the president’s thinking, Axios reported. Biden flouts the warnings and accuses his allies of allegedly not reporting positive national polls, such as the recent PBS/Marist poll.
“National polls basically have us registered voters up by four, likely voters we’re up by more,” Biden told donors last week.
Swing state polling is a greater indicator of presidential campaign success than national polling. Numerous swing state polls show Trump dominating Biden. The latest negative Times poll, published on Monday, showed Trump gained eight percentage points among 2020 swing state voters who cast ballots for Biden. It also showed a majority of swing state voters said there is “not really any chance” they would cast a vote for Biden.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Greensburg, Pa., Friday, May 6, 2022 (Gene J. Puskar/AP).
The Biden campaign continues to defend its strategy and claims Biden’s far-left policies of open borders and Bidenomics are popular ideas. “President Biden is running on a popular agenda for all Americans and to finish the job on the issues that American people demand action on,” Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said.
Biden campaign pollsters also gloss over the negative polling trends for the president.
“This campaign is not arguing for the status quo,” Biden campaign pollster Molly Murphy asserted. “The most important piece is acknowledging that people are still feeling frustrated and behind, and that the problems and the struggles that people are facing were not caused by this president and in fact have been alleviated” by him.
“The only consistency in recent public polls is inconsistency,” Geoff Garin, a second Biden campaign pollster argued.
