President Joe Biden expressly, insistently intends to run for reelection, but an overwhelming majority of Americans want Biden to step aside… including most Democrats.
That’s according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that shows just 37% of Democrats say they want him to seek a second term, down from 52% in the weeks before last year’s midterm elections.
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Granted, Biden has seen a noticeable rise in his approval ratings since his low of 36 percent in July. Since September, he’s seen approval ratings hovering around 40 or 45 percent. However, approval ratings don’t necessarily predict election results.
The president has apparently been trying to tout his legislative record and ability to govern, but the poll suggests relatively few U.S. adults are buying it. Follow-up interviews with poll respondents suggest that many believe the 80-year-old’s age is a liability, with people focused on his coughing, his gait, his gaffes and the possibility that the world’s most stressful job would be better suited for someone younger.
“I, honestly, think that he would be too old,” Sarah Overman, a 37-year-old Democrat working in education in Raleigh, North Carolina, told The Associated Press. “We could use someone younger in the office.”
Biden has previously leaned heavily on his track record to say that he’s more than up to the task. When asked if he can handle the office’s responsibilities at his age, the president has often responded as if he’s accepting a dare: “Watch me.”
The Democrats performed better than expected in last year’s midterm elections, in which they expanded their control of the Senate by one seat and narrowly lost their House majority even though history indicated there would be a Republican wave.
Still, Only 22% of U.S. adults overall say Biden should run again, down from 29% who said so before last year’s midterm elections.
As of January, only 13% have a lot of confidence in Biden’s ability to accomplish major policy goals, a possible reflection of the fact that he must now work with a Republican majority in the House that wants to cut spending in return for lifting the government’s legal borrowing authority.
Sure enough, only a measly 9% have “a great deal of confidence” in Biden’s ability to work with Republicans in Congress, despite Biden’s constant bloviating about his deal-making skills. On this metric, Biden has sunk 11 points since his inauguration.
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The decline among Democrats saying Biden should run again for president appears concentrated among younger people. Among Democrats age 45 and over, 49% say Biden should run for reelection, nearly as many as the 58% who said that in October. But among those under age 45, 23% now say he should run for reelection, after 45% said that before the midterms.
Already the oldest president in U.S. history, Biden has been dogged by questions about his age as he would be 86 if he serves a full eight years as president. The president needs to work long days, standing for hours, remembering the names of strangers that he or she meets while traveling who want to share a story about their lives with him.
Yet he’s been a national political figure for a half-century, having first been elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972, and the moments when he appears lost on stage or stumbles through speeches can garner more attention than his policies.
On CNN on Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 41, acknowledged that “generational arguments can be powerful.” Buttigieg sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, and he finished ahead of Biden in that year’s Iowa caucus.
The poll also shows only 23% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” of confidence in Biden to effectively manage the White House. That has ticked down from 28% a year ago and remains significantly lower than 44% two years ago, just as Biden took office. Just 21% have a lot of confidence in Biden’s ability to handle a crisis, down slightly from 26% last March.
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Biden may have drawn a high turnout in 2020… but he shouldn’t count on that again in 2024.
The poll of 1,068 adults was conducted Jan. 26-30 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is 4.2 percentage points.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.