Photograph Source: Metropolitan Transportation – CC BY 2.0
At the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Philadelphia last week, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made a rare joint appearance. “Let me ask you a simple question: Are you with me?” Biden asked. The crowd responded with chants of “four more years! Four more years!”
Their excitement begged the question: are these Democratic diehards not aware of what their own voters have been telling pollsters about the prospects of a Joe Biden 2024 campaign?
In a recent poll from NBC News, only 7 percent of voters were enthusiastic about a 2024 Joe Biden reelection bid. In an ABC/Washington Post poll released Sunday, 60 percent of Democratic voters said they’d prefer a candidate other than Joe Biden to be the 2024 nominee. Monday’s AP poll found that only 37 percent of Democrats – and only 23 percent of Democrats under the age of 45 – want to see Biden run for president again. A July New York Times poll showed that a whopping 94 percent of Democratic voters under 30 want someone other than Biden as the nominee in 2024. In the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, just 34 percent of Americans describe Biden as honest and trustworthy, a new low for his Presidency.
Despite these dreadful numbers, the Democratic Party at the national level, at least publicly, has been nothing but united behind the president.
The outward confidence of Biden and most DNC members is built on the bluer-than-expected midterm results. But those results may be a mirage – if Biden hurt rather than helped Democrats in the midterms. An anonymous Democratic congress member told The New York Times that “Biden’s numbers were a ‘huge drag’ on Democratic candidates, who won in spite of the president not thanks to him.” An NBC exit poll found 67 percent of voters didn’t want Biden to run again, even as Democrats in general did fairly well.
When confronted with his sagging personal poll numbers and asked about running again, Biden’s response was simply “watch me” – even as Democrats have expressed their unease and un-enthusiasm for the president.
Despite the polling, all signs point to Biden running again. Recent tactics also suggest he knows he is vulnerable to progressive opposition in the primaries. Biden prodded the DNC last week to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina as the first-in-the-nation primary. Deep-red South Carolina is where a struggling candidate Biden won big in 2020 and consolidated his nomination when Democratic candidates dropped out and pledged their support to Biden. It is where current DNC head Jamie Harrison is from. But it is not a state that will be competitive in the general election; any Democratic campaign resources spent there in a primary will not gain any electoral votes for Democrats.
The Biden camp says rejiggering the primary schedule is simply a move toward greater voter diversity. Tellingly, Team Biden didn’t propose Georgia to be first-in-the-nation; it’s more diverse than South Carolina, has growing grassroots progressive activism, and is indeed a battleground state that Democrats could win in November 2024.
While campaigning for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Biden said, “I like the New Hampshire Primary being where it is for a simple reason. I think I can win here.”
Now, he knows he can’t win in a competitive primary in New Hampshire. He got 8.4 percent of the state’s primary vote in 2020, landing him in fifth place. And he also knows that a loss there, or even a competitive showing from a progressive, would be embarrassing. After all, President Lyndon B. Johnson only decided against running for reelection in 1968 after antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy took 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, a result that led Sen. Robert Kennedy to jump into the race; LBJ chose to focus on his current term rather than a reelection campaign.
If Biden does announce he’s running for President in 2024, it will be despite what most Democrats want, especially young Democrats. His disconnect from the reality of his dismal popularity among his party’s base puts Democrats’ chances of winning in 2024 at serious risk.
It’s time for Biden to quit lying to himself. And time for elected Democrats to start speaking some truth. If Democrats want to keep the White House in 2024, it can’t be with Joe Biden leading the ticket.
