by Adeline Von Drehle
Joe Biden faces a difficult road to reelection as his support among key components of the Democratic base, including young and non-white voters, continues to wane, according to recent numbers in a USA Today/Suffolk University poll.
President Biden’s support among African American voters is at an eye-opening 63%, down 8 points from a November poll and a striking decline from the 87% Biden carried in 2020. Also, Biden dominated Trump among Hispanic voters in 2020 (65%-32%), yet now trails among that demographic by 5 points (39%-34%).
Among voters under 35, a generation that voted decidedly Democratic in 2020 and a group solidly anti-GOP on social issues, Trump leads Biden 37%-33%.
In short, the numbers for Biden are withering. Biden has 10 months to either consolidate his coalition or make history as the first Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights era to earn less than 80% of the black vote. The one piece of good news for Biden is that these voters do not seem to be flocking to the Trump camp, but rather claim they will cast their votes for independent party candidates if 2024 sees another Trump-Biden matchup. One in five Hispanic, black, and young voters now say they’ll back someone other than the two main candidates. Biden’s poor polling mirrors his abysmal job approval rating, which at 40.2% is the worst of any modern president at this stage in their term. His numbers recall those of Jimmy Carter’s, the last Democratic president to lose reelection. Biden’s year-end approval rating is just decimal points above what Carter’s was in December 1979 (37%), the year before he lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.
With the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary quickly approaching, and with no significant challenger for the Democratic Party nomination, the Biden camp must reassemble its core bloc of voters if they hope to have a chance of beating Trump, who currently leads Biden by 2.2 points (46.5%-44.3%) in the RCP 2024 Presidential General Election Average.
