DNC in Panic Mode: Biden Approval Plummets Again Despite 2024 Re-Election Rumors
Not only are President Joe Biden’s poll numbers continuing to trend downwards, the people who are supposed to be in his corner are bailing, too.
According to a poll by the conservative-leaning Trafalgar Group conducted between Nov. 26 and 29, Biden’s approval rating stands at 36.3 percent with 59.1 disapproving — a nearly 23-point negative spread for the president.
Biden’s poll numbers have been taking a hit for a variety of reasons, particularly since the realities of his presidency — politically driven incompetence, inflation, supply-chain issues, geopolitical weakness — have become apparent. (Unlike the mainstream media, we here at The Western Journal have seen these problems since the beginning and we’ve been chronicling them; you can help us in our fight to bring Americans the truth by subscribing.)
#BidenApproval continues to dip:#Inds 29.3%,#Dem 65.0%,#GOP 8.2%
36.3% Approve,
59.1% Disapprove,
4.6% No Opinion,According to @trafalgar_group #PresidentialApproval #poll Conducted 11/26-29.
See Report: https://t.co/bpiFS1JxgA pic.twitter.com/dsI7yIBboN— Robert C. Cahaly (@RobertCahaly) December 1, 2021
Not only are his numbers down in the Trafalgar poll, but there’s bad news from another poll taken a month ago — this one from NPR-Marist College.
While Democrats approve of his performance by an 85 percent to 10 percent margin, only 41 percent think the Democrats have a better chance of winning in 2024 if he’s the nominee, according to The Washington Post. That’s the same percentage as the number who think they’d have a better chance with someone else, the Post reported.
Meanwhile, if you throw “Democrat-leaning independents” into the mix, only 36 percent think that Biden would give the Democrats a better chance of winning. Forty-four percent, meanwhile, didn’t think he would.
Overall, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Biden at a 42.3 percent approval rating as of Dec. 2, with 52.2 percent disapproving. However, his trajectory in the Trafalgar poll as shown by RCP indicates where he’s heading.
In a previous poll taken between Oct. 19 and Oct. 21, Biden was at 39 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval. An Oct. 4-6 poll showed him with a 40-56 percent approval/disapproval split. A Sept. 8-9 poll had the split at 44-54. In an Aug. 8-11 poll, 47 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved.
In the RCP average itself, meanwhile, Biden has been underwater since Aug. 20, when the administration was in the midst of bungling the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s been mostly downhill since then, and not just because of the fall-of-Saigon-esque images that came out of Kabul.
That transitory inflation? Not entirely transitory. It’s still eating away at American income. Jobs reports continue to disappoint. Vaccine mandates have been divisive — and the administration has consistently lost in court.
Beyond the administration’s policy failures is the man at its head. If the message isn’t popular, sometimes a slick messenger can serve as window dressing. Whatever the opposite of window dressing is, that’s Joe Biden. (I’d say the metaphorical antonym would involve throwing a brick through the window, but let’s face it — Joe Biden isn’t throwing a brick through anything.)
Biden was never a particularly energizing figure, but the 79-year-old president is a man now shorn of all charisma — bumbling and shuffling his way through speeches that have become progressively less coherent and more peppered with gaffes.
Meanwhile, the same quirks that turned people off of him are still there, arguably in greater abundance. Making up anecdotes out of whole cloth? Racial faux pas? Inappropriate bellicosity? Getting too touchy? General-issue creepy uncle behavior? Check, check, check, check and check.
All of this comes amid word circulating through the political world that the Biden camp is already taking steps at shoring up his reelection effort in 2024 by potentially jettisoning a figure who’s become an even greater drag on the presidency than the president himself: Vice
President Kamala Harris.
Under normal circumstances, Harris would be the star player on the Democrats’ bench, just waiting for the chance to step out on the field and show her off her abilities to take over the starting role.
If the president isn’t performing, however, the bench isn’t looking particularly good, either.
Harris would be the obvious choice for Biden’s successor, but her poll numbers are even worse; the RealClearPolitics average, as of Nov. 30, has her at 40.4 percent favorable to 51.6 percent unfavorable. Numbers like that can for the presidential understudy can only put the Democratic National Committee in panic mode.
Part of the problem is personality. If Biden is simply uncharismatic these days, Harris has proven to be anti-charismatic, a kind of charisma-vacuum that actively sucks life out of the Democratic Party. Part of the problem, too, is that Harris’ organizational issues haven’t improved during the year since she was installed as veep and two years since her own campaign for the presidency imploded.
Last week, Harris lost another staffer — this time chief spokeswoman Symone Sanders, usually the person who would go on record defending Harris whenever a piece about the exodus of talent from the vice president’s office and the toxic environment that caused it would land.
This time, one of the vice president’s defenders was Sean Clegg, a former consultant to Harris when she was a politician in California. Like those who came before him, he implied that criticism of Harris was partly misogynist when he talked to The Washington Post. See if you can spy where he went wrong, however:
“People personalize these things,” Clegg said. “I’ve never had an experience in my long history with Kamala where I felt like she was unfair. Has she called bulls***? Yes. And does that make people uncomfortable sometimes? Yes. But if she were a man with her management style, she would have a TV show called ‘The Apprentice.’”
As John McCormack noted at National Review, “It’s hard to tell what’s worse for Vice President Kamala Harris in this Washington Post story — the comments from anonymous former staffers trashing her management style or the on-the-record comment defending her management style by likening Harris to Donald Trump.”
Hence, the rumors that are now reportedly buzzing around Washington’s unofficial centers of power that Biden and those surrounding him are talking up the possibility of removing Harris from the 2024 re-election effort.
Any move like that would have to be done with finesse, of course, to placate the Democratic base the selection of Harris was designed to appeal to in the first place: The party’s voting bloc among black Americans.
That could mean kicking Harris upstairs to the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming she could win Senate approval, that would open up room on on the Biden ticket for yet another face intended to appeal to potentially more Democratic voters than the first black female vice president.
But there are problems for Biden there, too.
Plan B seems to be Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a man recently seen telling America that racist roads need to be destroyed and that they could save on gas if only they’d buy an electric car.
That doesn’t look like a winner, no matter what the mainstream media cheerleaders are saying.
Before 2024, however, are the 2022 midterms. With an unpopular president and a slate of Democrats who will have to defend him, this means the White House could lose both houses of Congress.
Losing even one would be catastrophic, considering the Biden administration has shown almost no bipartisan impulse.
Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama faced intense opposition from Republican congressional majorities, of course. But Biden would be facing a GOP soured on Democratic rule by abuse of budget reconciliation and executive orders, in an even more deeply polarized environment than the country saw in the 1990s and during the Obama years.
That doesn’t augur well for the Biden White House with a divided government.
Democrats looking at Biden’s poll numbers should very rightly be panicked, given they appear to be the perfect storm for a red wave in next year’s midterms. The worst part for Democrats, however, is that there’s no one who looks poised to swoop in and save the administration — and the party it represents — from itself.
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