President Joe Biden is having an awful time in the polls, with surveys showing even core Democratic supporters are unhappy with his job performance and – at best – less than excited about casting a vote for the incumbent president next fall.
At the same time, Democrats are having a great year at the polls themselves, with Tuesday night’s near sweep of key elections capping a year when the party’s candidates have well overperformed in state and local races and won every state referendum on abortion rights.
The political contradiction has the Democrats and Republicans in a quandary: Do the Democratic wins mean Biden is better-positioned than he appears for next year’s presidential election? Is the 80-year-old Biden (who turns 81 on Nov. 20) uniquely vulnerable because of his age and other issues? And can down-ticket Democrats reverse the typical dynamic – where the presidential nominee either boosts or deflates candidates in his party – and help raise their leader to victory next year?
“I do think at some point this is a Biden problem, not a Democratic Party problem,” says GOP strategist Jason Cabel Roe, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. Despite Democratic wins this year and last year, “I do think he’s vulnerable – absolutely,” Roe adds.
Democrats deftly used abortion rights to win not only a referendum on the issue in Ohio but the Kentucky governor’s race and key state legislative seats as well. In a year when the president is deeply unpopular, his party remarkably took control of the state Senate in Virginia, picked up several seats in the New Jersey state legislature and won a special election for a New Hampshire state legislative seat that puts the party on the cusp of taking back control of the 400-member chamber next year.
That follows a year when Democrats have overperformed (meaning they won by more than anticipated or lost by a smaller margin than the district demographics would suggest) by an average of 10 percentage points.
So, what are you going to believe, Democratic officials and political operatives say, your lyin’ eyes, opinion polls or actual voters who have put Democrats on a winning streak?
“A year out, these [polling] numbers are a snapshot. I don’t see them necessarily as a predictor” of the 2024 elections, says the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor. “These are just going to be very close races. I think it’s too far out to tell.”
Biden on Thursday dismissed questions about polling – actually, a sobering New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday that showed the president trailing GOP front-runner Donald Trump in five of six battleground states.
“Because you don’t read the polls. Ten polls: Eight of them, I’m beating him in those states – eight of them. You guys only do two, CNN and New York Times. Check it out. Check it out. We’ll get you copies of all those other polls,” Biden said as he prepared to leave for a speech before United Auto Workers in Illinois.
Asked if he thought he was trailing in battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the president said, “No, I don’t.”
Biden campaign operatives say they expect a close race next year and are preparing for it. And while some Democrats – notably, most recently, former Barack Obama senior adviser David Axelrod – have suggested Biden step aside, the sitting president’s team says history shows Biden should not be underestimated.
During the 2020 primary season, many pundits counted out Biden, who had fared poorly in early nominating contests before scoring a pivotal win in South Carolina.
But “if we want a real window” into how Biden is positioned for the 2024 election, people should look less to what people tell pollsters and more to “how people are actually voting,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, campaign manager for the Biden-Kamala Harris campaign, told reporters in a conference call Thursday.
And while the president was not actually on the ticket this year or in the midterms, “Republican attempts to use President Biden and his agenda as an attack on Democrats really failed,” she added.
Part of Republicans’ troubles since last summer has been voter anger – especially among women, who make up the majority of voters – over the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that took away the guaranteed right to an abortion.
The Kentucky GOP sought to tie Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to Biden, who is very unpopular in the Bluegrass State, but Republican nominee Daniel Cameron’s hard-line anti-abortion stance helped Beshear cruise to a comfortable victory there.
“We told people to pay attention to what was happening in states like Virginia and Kentucky and ballot measures in Ohio because Republicans were using those as test cases for what they might be able to accomplish in 2024,” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, a political organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.
Cartoons on the 2024 Election
Virginia state legislative candidates campaigned heavily on the issue, warning Old Dominioners that if GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin secured a Republican trifecta (controlling both chambers of the legislature as well as the governorship), he would ban abortion, removing Virginia’s current status as the last Southern state where abortion is mostly legal.
Youngkin came up with what he termed a compromise: a 15-week ban. But the idea didn’t sway enough voters and he ended up with a state legislature in which both parties are under Democratic control.
“We had a similar set of predictions in ‘22 about Democratic poor performance that didn’t come to pass,” said Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. “At the end of the day, it’s a choice – and whatever your feelings about the president when you’re looking squarely into the face of candidates that are going to take your rights away.”
The issue bedevils GOP presidential candidates as well. Trump has bragged repeatedly about putting the justices on the Supreme Court who reversed the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion – an argument likely to alienate some voters in key states.
Even after Tuesday’s elections, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican whom Democrats have made a poster boy for abortion bans, sent out a fundraising email saying Democrats were “indoctrinating the young today” on the issue and needed to be stopped.
“The stakes could not be higher, and the sanctity of life hangs in the balance,” Johnson wrote. “It is a political battle for the soul of our nation,” the Republican added, borrowing a common Biden phrase, “and I am urging you to join me in this critical fight.”
The five Republicans in the GOP debate Wednesday night – former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – all underscore their anti-abortion credentials.
Haley, alone, said the GOP needed to find a better way to talk about the issue and not to demonize those who disagreed with them. The line won applause from the debate audience, but experts say pro-abortion rights voters are not likely to be appeased by it.
“Republicans are not very comfortable talking about abortion,” says conservative analyst Ford O’Connell, who was a Trump surrogate in the 2020 campaign.
“Democrats think they have a winning play. Republicans better figure that out fast,” he adds. “Biden is toxic by himself. A lot of Biden’s policies are toxic,” O’Connell adds, ticking off the border and inflation along with the president’s age. “Republicans just need to make sure they make their case on the issue that resonates best with that audience.”
Democrats, meanwhile, believe they can benefit not just from the abortion issue but discontent toward Trump, whose favorability numbers with the general electorate are on par with Biden’s. Trump’s legal woes – along with Republicans’ failure to “right the course” of their party after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, puts the threat of future extremism in the minds of voters as they head into the 2024 election season, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, told reporters in a conference call.
“Their failure to stand up to this extremism has put our country at risk,” she said.
With Biden sliding in the polls among key Democratic constituencies – including young people and Black and Hispanic voters – the state and local candidates could actually help propel Biden to victory, Gholar said.
“We continue to see here at Emerge how our alums, who are running for everything from state legislature to city council to school boards to key law enforcement positions, have really galvanized the voters in their communities. And that helps us lift the top of the ticket,” she said. With stubbornly low approval ratings a year out from the election, Biden will need all the help he can get.
– Kaia Hubbard contributed to this report
