The further Joe Biden sinks into the abyss, the harder it becomes to imagine any kind of recovery. That’s the story of the latest Times/Sienna poll, which shows the president’s approval at a record low of 33 percent. And to be sure, there’s nothing else about the survey that provides any positive news.
Even college-educated whites, long a bulwark of sorts for Biden’s presidential approval, are finally abandoning him.
Those numbers are just brutal. 25 percent with independents, a political identity that is only growing, might as well be the death knell of Biden’s political career. Even black Americans, while still the strongest demographic for the president, only approve slightly over 60 percent.
But it’s the Latino numbers that are truly something to behold. For decades, Democrats have banked on increased Hispanic immigration as a path to a permanent majority. But as is prone to happen in politics, the best-made plans can quickly be laid to waste. While the 32 percent approval for Biden among Hispanics is terrible, another number in the poll tells the tale.
38 percent of Hispanics are now voting in GOP primaries, which is equal to the share voting in Democrat primaries. It’s hard to express how game-changing that is, and it shows a seismic shift that could scramble expected political results for years to come. If Hispanics are now just as likely to vote for Republicans as they are Democrats, that puts all kinds of formerly unwinnable races in play for Republicans. We’ve seen that play out more recently in Texas, but the same effect will be felt all the way to California.
Moving past that to the issue-level polling, only one percent (yes, one percent) rated the economy as “excellent” while 75 percent said the economy is important to them, and even among the broader Democrat electorate, Biden is floundering. As my colleague Levon Satamian shared in his write-up on this poll, two-thirds of Democrats don’t even want Biden to be the nominee in 2024. And when your bench consists of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, you start to get an idea of how much of a corner the left has painted itself in.
But what choice do they have? They can’t allow Biden, who will be just shy of 82 years old on election day, to run again. We are now at the stage where the White House is falsifying transcripts to protect the president’s senility. Imagine how bad things will be two years from now?
Still, the Times/Sienna poll provides one glimmer of hope for Democrats. It finds that Biden leads Donald Trump 44 to 41 percent in a hypothetical matchup. That’s nothing to brag about, though. Any incumbent not breaking 45 percent is usually toast. Trump also has an electoral college advantage, which means he can lose the popular vote by more than three points and still win a presidential election. And if Trump isn’t the nominee, you are looking at a blowout in 2024 of epic proportions.
In short, it’s all bad news, all the time for the current president. Is this the end? It sure feels like it, and all the recent internal divisions within the Democrat Party point to Biden being tossed overboard sooner rather than later. The period after the mid-terms is going to be very interesting.