Jackson and extremist Republican candidates mitigates the backlash. He is painfully aware that it’s setting the scene for what might be an especially bleak November for Democrats, who are expected to lose their hold on the House and perhaps the Senate - no matter how hard they insist that record inflation isn’t Biden’s fault and that they’re working on fixing it, and perhaps even if the liberal rage over Dobbs v. Eighteen months into his term, he also knows that his own unpopularity now rivals only Trump’s and Jimmy Carter’s at this point in their presidencies, as far as modern history goes. That poll showed that 92 percent of Democrats, if I ran, would vote for me.” He was slightly misstating the result - that figure represents the number that would support him against Trump specifically - and skipping over the fact that the Times poll showed him and Trump combining for just 85 percent of the vote, a sign of voter dissatisfaction with the options.īiden knows as well as anyone, from decades of personal experience, that presidents’ first midterms usually become beatdowns for their party. Read the polls, Jack,” the fed-up president told a reporter not named Jack outside the White House a few hours later in response to a question about his crummy standing even among Democrats. And this was a relatively conservative sample of voters meant to model the 2022 midterm electorate, the operatives noted, “so these battleground numbers would indicate the national polls showing a 3-4 point lead are probably pretty solid.” Biden leaned into the message a few hours after the Times poll dropped. Just a few weeks ago, board members of Unite the Country, the original pro-Biden super-PAC, received a private memo outlining results of a new proprietary poll of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona voters, in which the group’s leaders acknowledged how unpopular “the Boss” is currently but revealed that he still narrowly led Trump in the midwestern states and only barely trailed in Arizona. His aides regularly show him both public and private poll results in which he leads his predecessor, and some of his biggest supporters tend to use such results as evidence that his dim political standing is temporary and the product of not having Trump to kick around. But the aides did want to make sure the “talkers” saw and boosted one nugget from the Times poll that they felt was being overlooked, even though it might render the rest of the survey moot: Biden, the pollsters had found, would still beat Donald Trump if a rematch were held today.īiden hates questions about his reelection plans and remains convinced that he must be the one to destroy Trump (again). No one even tried addressing the main takeaway of displeasure with their boss. No formal talking-points memo was forthcoming - there was no persuasive spinning to be done about such a grim revelation for the president. So members of Biden’s political and communications teams quickly did their best to advise surrogates and allies who might be asked to go on TV that day. The news - “Sixty-four percent of Democratic voters prefer a candidate other than president Biden in 2024, a Times/Siena College poll shows” - was, predictably, causing a headache on Pennsylvania Avenue. The texts and emails from the White House started pinging across Washington, D.C., only minutes after the New York Times alert popped up on dismayed Democrats’ phones last week.
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