President Joe Biden’s reelection bid was faltering long before his disastrous debate performance on June 27 and subsequent withdrawal from the presidential race on Sunday.
Americans were disappointed with Biden’s administration even before the first presidential debate, which appeared to be intended to revitalize Biden’s candidacy, left Democrats in disarray. Polling suggests that voters lost confidence in Biden’s handling of key issues, including the economy, inflation and immigration, long before Biden’s withdrawal was announced.
“Even before the debate, President Biden was struggling to win over voters primarily because of the economy and immigration,” Jon McHenry, a GOP polling analyst and vice president at North Star Opinion Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Joe Biden was trailing in swing states before the debate. Our polling showed him down by six points in Arizona in June and by eight points in North Carolina and 10 points in Georgia in May,” McHenry told the DCNF. “If you moved those states into the Trump column, Biden would need to win PA, MI, and WI to reach 270 electoral college votes.”
Prior to Biden’s withdrawal, 57% of Americans said they disapproved of him as president while only 37% approved of him, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll tracker. However, Biden’s low approval is not necessarily symptomatic of his debate performance, but rather has been a long standing issue for the president.
Biden’s disapproval rate has remained higher than his approval rate since September of 2021, according to FiveThirtyEight projections. In the few months leading up to the June 27 debate, Biden’s approval rating fell below 40% while his disapproval rating has soared over 50%.
The strong sentiment of disapproval was especially true across key issues like the economy and immigration.
When weighing presidential candidates, 85% of Americans said inflation was the most important issue and 88% said it was the economy, according to ABC News/Ipsos from May.
After the debate, 54% of voters said that they would prefer former President Donald Trump to handle economic issues while only 40% said they would prefer Biden, according to a poll conducted by USA Today/Suffolk University.
Under the Biden Administration, the U.S. national debt skyrocketed to over $34.8 trillion, which is $7 trillion higher than when he first took office in January of 2021. Some of his economic policies, including the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, respectively approved $1.9 trillion and $750 billion in new spending.
In February, Trump held a 22-point advantage over Biden on the economy, with 55% of voters preferring the former president while only 33% picked Biden, according to a national NBC News poll.
The same rings true on the issue of immigration. Immigration has steadily become one of the most important issues for voters, with 20% of voters saying it is now their top issue, compared to 13% in December, according to a March poll from the Wall Street Journal.
During Biden’s first term, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered over seven million migrants illegally crossing into the country. Within just the first year of his term, Biden took nearly 300 executive actions on immigration, 89 of which reversed Trump’s immigration policies, according to an analysis from the Migration Policy Institute.
After the debate, Biden faced an over 30-point deficit on his handling of immigration compared to Trump. Over half of voters, 52%, said Trump is more capable at handling national security, while only 42% said that Biden is more capable.
But even before the debate, 65% of voters said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of border security and 71% of voters said the border and immigration policy is headed in the wrong direction, according to the WSJ poll from March.
After withdrawing from the race, Biden announced his endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris, making her the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“Of course, the problem for Democrats now is that Vice President Kamala Harris will ‘own’ those issues that were hurting Biden before the debate, assuming she is the nominee,” McHenry told the DCNF. “She may bring a little more energy, and the excitement of a new nominee might reduce the enthusiasm gap that we were starting to see in our numbers, but any Democrat associated with this administration still has a deficit to overcome.”
(Featured image credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)
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