Poll after poll has made it very clear that Joe Biden is in real trouble. For the longest time, the narrative has been that Donald Trump can’t possibly win in 2024, but now it’s looking more like Joe Biden is destined to lose.
Conventional wisdom has long been that an incumbent president needs an approval rating in positive territory to get reelected. Well, Joe Biden hasn’t been in positive territory since his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Literally nothing he has done has restored faith in him or his presidency. He tried to run on the economy, branding it “Bidenomics,” only to realize too late that this effort backfired. More recently, he’s tried to pivot to make the 2024 election about foreign policy, but it’s hard to see how that’s going to work out any better for him. His foreign policy record is defined by Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the war in Israel. His botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is what sent his approval ratings underwater in the first place, a majority of Americans are now opposed to more funding for Ukraine, and Biden’s appeasement of Iran played a role in starting the war in Israel.
Still, between the looming election next year, disarray in the Republican Party, and the existence of foreign conflict, it sure seems like this would be the ideal time for Democrats to coalesce behind Biden. But they’re not. In fact, the latest CNBC poll shows him with a disapproval rating of 58% and an approval rating of just 37%. This is the highest disapproval rating of his presidency, and his second-lowest approval rating in the CNBC poll.
As for Biden’s plan to make the 2024 election about foreign policy, that’s not looking so good either. According to CNBC, “Even while Biden moved quickly to publicly support Israel and provide additional aid, the public is giving the president poor marks for this handling of foreign policy. Just 31% approve and 60% disapprove.”
Making the situation worse for Biden is that he’s not getting high marks from his own party. “Just 66% of Democrats support his handling of foreign policy and 74% back his handling of the economy, compared with 81% overall approval by Democrats,” reports CNBC.
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“You don’t get sub 40 approval ratings without losing large chunks of your base. And that’s what’s happening here,″ said Micah Roberts, partner at Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican pollster for the CNBC survey. Roberts described the results as “distressing numbers for a president facing reelection.”
Jay Campbell, partner at Hart Research Associates, the Democratic pollster for the CNBC survey, couldn’t find much of a bright side for Biden either. He described Biden’s numbers among young, black, and Latino voters as “very troubling” for him. Campbell posited that these voters have been hard hit by the Biden economy and “you start to think that maybe they’ve run out of patience, and it’s starting to show through in their decreasing regard for the president.”
The CNBC poll is the latest poll to show Biden losing to Trump in a 2024 matchup, and it’s easy to see that Biden has to make up ground within his own party–which is a terrible position for an incumbent to be in at this point. If they haven’t coalesced behind him now, it’s hard to see the dynamics of this race changing in Biden’s favor.
