“Ditch Joe Biden” could become Democrats’ version of “Let’s Go Brandon,” judging by some shocking numbers just revealed by NPR.
A new Marist poll conducted for NPR and PBS News Hour revealed that a plurality of Democrats nationwide think Biden hurts their chances of keeping the White House in 2024.
When asked, “Do you think Democrats have a better chance of winning the presidency in 2024 if Joe Biden is the party’s nominee, or if someone else is the party’s nominee?” 44% of Democrats and Dem-leaners thought the party would be better off with “someone else” on top of the ticket.
Only 36% agreed that Biden would be the better choice and 20% weren’t sure.
That’s remarkable for a first-year POTUS, maybe unprecedented.
The Marist poll sampled 1,209 American adults, not likely voters or even registered voters, so it’s impossible to gauge how the negative sentiment would play in a — so far, hypothetical — primary race.
But as a gauge of the nation’s mood right now, it’s almost certainly a bad omen for the guy already becoming known as President Poopy Pants.
“Usually,” as Conn Carroll noted, “the administration’s vice president is a strong favorite, but Kamala Harris is just as unpopular as Biden, with 51% of voters having an unfavorable opinion of her.”
A couple of notes.
The first is that when things aren’t going well, a hypothetical primary challenger you don’t know is often going to be more appealing than the real president you do know. Oftentimes what happens is that the real challenger emerges and voters decide to stick with the drooler they know.
That caveat aside, there are two juicy numbers in the cross-tabs that ought to cause some sleepless nights for the Committee to Reelect the Pedo, or whatever Biden’s 2024 campaign committee is called.
While the suburbs are about evenly split (39%-38%) over whether to get on board the Ditch Joe Biden bandwagon, elsewhere it’s a different story.
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If we play along with the notion that the 2020 election was totes legit, Biden won in no small part because he won back large numbers of rural voters who couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nevertheless, Biden polls worse with rural Democrats than he does nationally. 45% would like to see someone else on the ticket, 25% aren’t sure, and a mere 30% would stick with Biden.
But here’s the big tell.
As you know, the Big Blue Cities are the Democrats’ main power centers. Public sector unions, minority voters, and massive vote turnout machines (both legal and otherwise).
So when a sitting Democrat president, even with all those goodies and favors to hand out, has 53% of urban Democrats saying they want someone else, that looks like a real opportunity for a challenger.
With all that union money and ward-healer muscle looking around for ABB (Anyone But Biden), you never know who might appear out of the woodwork to try and take advantage.
We’re still nearly two years off from seeing if a real challenger (or challengers?) emerge from the Democratic ranks to push Grandpa Joe off the cliff.
But if Biden can’t do something to improve country’s condition, and maybe even more importantly, the country’s mood, he might be the first president since the doomed George HW Bush to draw a serious primary challenger.
In the West Wing, I imagine the suspense is terrible.
I hope it’ll last.
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