A drop in popularity is not preventing President Joe Biden from remaining the favorite to represent Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.
Biden officially launched his bid for re-election in April of this year, and since then his campaign has been met with a mixture of support and skepticism from members of his own party.
For voters, Biden's age is a primary cause for concern. The president would be 86 at the end of a second mandate, if he were to be re-elected, causing voters of a recent poll to put his "mental fitness" into question.
Over the weekend, Biden signed a stop-gap bill that the Congress approved at the last minute in order to avoid a government shutdown that had been looming over the country for the past month.
The measure, however, shows power slipping from Biden's hands as Democrats failed to secure support for Ukraine in the bill, a key item in the party’s agenda.
As of Monday, the president has an approval rate of 40% and a disapproval rate of 54%, as per Fivethirtyeight. This puts him in a tight match against former President Donald Trump, Biden's most likely competition in the 2024 election presidential election.
A recent poll shows that Trump is gaining support in Hispanic and Black communities. The former president continues to hold a strong lead among Republican voters in polls, in spite of mounting legal charges, which recently added a fraud accusation that could turn his business empire upside down.
But approval ratings might not be the best tool to predict election results.
"After 2022, we need to retire the fixation w/approval ratings as a predictor of voter behavior," said Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella.
"The numbers looked pretty bad for Biden and Democrats in the midterm. All the polling had Biden approval upside down…and look what happened. It didn't materialize," he said during a News Nation interview.
It's not the first time in history that poor approval ratings weren’t reflected in an election. At a similar stage of Barack Obama's first term, his approval ratings were similar to those of Biden today, and he was successfully re-elected, a Wall Street Journal report points out.
Yet, the WSJ quotes several Democratic figures who express a feeling of resignation towards Biden's domination of the 2024 presidential bid for his party. While some Democrats would like to see a new face take the lead, nobody is currently harnessing as much support as Biden, and the stakes are too high to go for an alternative candidate.
No major Democrats have challenged Biden's bid in an upcoming primary, and most party leaders have publicly expressed support for the incumbent president. Even former contestants for the 2020 presidency within the party said they're standing behind Biden for 2024, including Bernie Sanders.
Former Democratic Mayor of Miami Beach Philip Levine expressed concern about the party's inability to transfer its leadership to younger generations of politicians.
"It is a little bit like your grandfather running the company and you know that he's at a point now where the heirs could suffer if we don't change management at the top," Levine told the Journal.
A member of the Democratic National Committee told the outlet in anonymity that there are few reasons to be optimistic about Biden's run at re-election.
"People can be hopeful about what the result is going to be. But we don't have any evidence as to why we should be hopeful. The polling is bad. The approval ratings are bad. We know about concerns about both the president's age and about the vice president if she were to take over," the person said.
Yet regardless of the private concerns of some dissonant voices within the Democratic Party, all compasses point towards a Biden-Trump match in 2024.
Image made using artificial intelligence with Midjourney AI.
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