The first New York Times poll of the 2022 election cycle found President Joe Biden is in a perilous position.
Summary
The first New York Times/ Siena College poll of the 2022 election cycle found President Joe Biden is in a perilous position.
- The president’s approval rating among voters has plummeted to a new low of 33 percent.
- Even Democrats are dissatisfied with the leader of their party: 64 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to seek a second term in 2024. According to the poll, 94 percent of Democrats under 30 want a different nominee.
- A mere 26 percent of Democratic voters want Biden to seek a second term.
- One-third of Democrats want a different nominee due to concerns about the president’s age – he will become the first octogenarian president later this year. The poll found that 32 percent of Democrats want a new nominee because they are dissatisfied with his job performance.
- The Times found only 13 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track – the lowest rating since the Great Recession. The poll found that 75 percent of voters said the economy was “extremely important,” while only 1 percent rated the economy as “excellent.”
- Nearly 80 percent of Americans think the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction – “a pervasive sense of pessimism that spans every corner of the country.”
- The only bright spot for President Biden was a hypothetical rematch with former President Donald Trump. Even while facing enormous public discontent, Biden still would defeat Trump by a margin of 44 percent to 41 percent.
- The New York Times’s chief political analyst said of the poll, “This felt like a poll from 2016, not from 2020,” as “Americans again seem to be as dissatisfied with the leading candidates as they were in 2016.”
- The Washington Post assessed how much left-wing Democrats’ frustrations with Biden could matter for 2022. Biden “will need as much enthusiasm from his base as possible to boost Democrats’ hopes of avoiding big losses in November.”
- CNN wrote that even as Democratic concerns about a Biden 2024 bid grow, potential Democratic challengers aren’t stepping up to the plate. Potential challengers like Gov. Gavin Newsom, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Rep. Ro Khanna all reiterated their support for Biden.
- Despite their protestations of support, the Washington Examiner argued Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are all positioning themselves to run in 2024 if Biden continues to falter.
- National Review linked Biden’s dismal polls to “alarming” inflation rates and the viral June video of Biden falling off his bike in Delaware.
- Breitbart found more bad news for Biden from the NYT poll. The poll found that 60 percent of voters disapproved of Biden, and 45 percent strongly disapproved. A whopping 63 percent of Hispanic voters disapproved of his job performance. “Biden is not only in serious, serious trouble with voters; he’s in serious trouble with his own base.”
Author’s Take
It isn’t just one poll. President Joe Biden’s job approval is more than 20 points underwater in the RealClearPolitics polling average. In their average of recent polls, Biden sits at a 37.4 approval rating, while 57.6 percent of voters disapprove. Public dissatisfaction with the president will be an anchor around Democratic candidates in November. A Politico article published this morning found that thanks to Biden’s poor numbers, Republicans are competitive in deep-blue territory like western Rhode Island, Connecticut, and California. Should Biden’s polling slide continue, November’s midterms will prove to be a brutal reckoning for the party in power.
Republicans aren’t totally in the clear, however. Even with historically low approval numbers, in a 2024 rematch Biden would still defeat Trump. Clearly, the public is deeply dissatisfied with both party’s frontrunners in 2024. Biden would be 82, while Trump would turn 80 turning a hypothetical second term. For 2024, both parties could benefit from younger voices and new blood instead of unpopular retreads.
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© Dominic Moore, 2022
