Biden poll freakout
Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent, Washington Examiner
The political and media world fell into a mini-frenzy over the weekend with the release of not one but two polls showing President Joe Biden in dire political shape.
The most newsworthy of the polls came from the Washington Post and ABC News. Biden's job approval rating in the new survey is 37%, with disapproval at 56%. Approval of his handling of the economy is 30%. Approval of his handling of the border crisis is 23%. The survey found deep unhappiness about the state of the economy in general, energy prices, food prices, and the income of average workers. Only 33% of Democrats said they want Biden to run for a second term, versus 62% who don't.
Those are terrible numbers for a sitting president, but truth be told, they're not all that different from the results we've seen in many polls in recent months. So why the frenzy? Because of this question from the pollsters: "If the 2024 presidential election were being held today and the candidates were Donald Trump and Joe Biden, for whom would you vote? Would you lean toward Trump or Biden?" The result was decisive: Trump held a 10-point lead, 52% to 42%, among registered voters.
What? Trump with a 10-point lead? The prospect was too awful for the Washington Post and many others in the media. It must be wrong! An outlier! Indeed, in the headline and again in the article, the Washington Post declared its own finding an "outlier." "The sizable margin of Trump's lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead head," the Washington Post reported. "The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump's and Biden's coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier."
Other observers went slightly bonkers over the result. As Mollie Hemingway noted: "Democrat analyst Larry Sabato, who confidently predicted Hillary Clinton would win 352 electoral votes in 2016 (she received 227 in her loss to Donald Trump), asked the Washington Post, 'How could you even publish a poll so absurd on its face? Will be a lingering embarrassment for you.'" A number of other voices said similar things.
One odd note was that the Washington Post did not cast doubt on the other results from this poll, so the paper must not believe that the survey was fundamentally flawed from start to finish. It was just the Trump-beats-Biden figure. It should be said that polls are never a predictor of what is going to happen more than a year from now. Instead, they are a snapshot of how people feel today, which might change significantly in the coming months. Also, this poll could be completely wrong. But the selective outrage over one of the poll's findings was striking.
It was particularly striking given the finding of the other poll released over the weekend, this one from NBC News. It, too, asked the Biden vs. Trump question, but it found the race to be tied at 46% to 46%. So obviously that was a big difference from the Washington Post poll. It doesn't say which one is right or whether either one is right.
But here is the news in the NBC poll. In addition to asking about a Biden versus Trump scenario, it also asked about Biden versus some other Republican candidates. And when the pollsters asked voters about a contest between Biden and Republican Nikki Haley, Haley came out ahead by 5 points, 46% to 41%. (In the other match polled, Biden vs. Ron DeSantis, Biden edged the Florida governor, 46% to 45%.)
Haley beating Biden by 5 points? That's news. Maybe even bigger news than Biden trailing Trump by 10 points. It's news because it suggests Biden's vulnerability not just to Trump but to at least one other Republican, Haley, whom voters see as a plausible alternative to the current president.
Both polls show Biden in bad political shape. There's really no dispute about that. But these new polls from the Washington Post-ABC and NBC News take Biden's problem to a new level of concern among Democrats. For the moment at least — and remember, the poll is a snapshot of just this moment — the president is losing ground not just to Trump but to at least one other Republican challenger as well.
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