President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign is getting off to a rough start.
After announcing his decision to seek another term, he has been slapped with a couple of brutal polls.
And on Thursday, CNN’s Jake Tapper delivered another round of, as he said, “horrible news” to the president.
“Horrible news, horrible, for Joe Biden in our new CNN poll. While the president leads his Democratic competitors by a huge margin, two-thirds of all the American people surveyed, 66% of the public, say that a Biden victory would either be a setback or a disaster for the United States,” Tapper said.
Speaking about how Americans view Biden, the CNN host described the results in the poll as “some bad numbers.”
The network’s political director, David Chalian, noted just 35% of Americans said they have a favorable opinion of the president, while 57% said they have an unfavorable view.
Former President Donald Trump received a 37% favorable rating and a 57% unfavorable rating in the same poll.
Watch the video below:
"Horrible news, horrible for Joe Biden": New CNN poll finds 66% of Americans say a Biden victory would either be a "setback" or a "disaster" pic.twitter.com/wgXuNRvWxW
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 25, 2023
Meanwhile, the poll found 41% said a Biden victory would be a disaster and 26% said it would be a setback. Forty-four percent said it would be a disaster if Trump won in 2024, but only 12% said it would be a setback.
It is probably best not to get too excited about this poll if you think it shows Biden is incredibly weak and easily beatable in 2024.
In 2022, we saw poll after poll after poll that showed Biden’s approval rating sliding, paired with stories about Democrats raising concerns about his age. And it appeared he was going to be a boulder tied around Democratic candidates and drag them down to the electoral abyss.
Yet, his party had a surprisingly strong midterm election where Democrats expanded their majority in the Senate and narrowly lost the House.
Perhaps that election was an outlier and voters decoupled their views of Biden from the party and it will be a different story when he’s on the ballot — but that would be a risky bet.
The poll could also be seen as “horrible news, horrible,” for Trump, too, given his favorability rating.
And a focus group conducted by The Washington Post provided a warning sign for Republicans. It was made up of voters who backed Trump in 2016, then switched to Biden in 2020. And nine of the 15 voters said despite all their concerns about Biden, they would vote for him over Trump in 2024.
Republicans should take a hard look at the candidates if they want to win. Trump is someone who will gin up fear and loathing and send Democrats to the polls, crawling through rain, ice, snow, and over broken glass for the Democratic nominee while repeating to comforting themselves by chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”
Biden appears to be incredibly weak as an incumbent. But in a race between two unpopular candidates, there’s a good chance voters will go with the unpopular candidate who comes off as a confused elderly man who gets lost and doesn’t know what is going on, rather than the one perceived as angry and cruel.