By Dave Andrusko
The bad news keeps pouring in for pro-abortion President Joe Biden, raising the question how low can his approval go?
According to Jason Lange, a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken over four days ending Monday,
showed just 36% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38% in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022. While this month’s drop was within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error, it could bode poorly for Biden as he faces off with Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Lange writes that the that the poll laid out Biden’s “weaknesses as well as a few strengths.” Of the former, the Washington Examiner’s Brady Knox notes
Especially worrying for Biden is that respondents gave former President Donald Trump significantly higher ratings in several key fields, including the economy, immigration, and foreign conflicts and terrorism.
Roughly 40% of respondents said that Trump had better economic policies, compared to 30% who sided with Biden. Trump was far ahead on immigration with a 42% preference, compared to just 25% who picked Biden. On the matter of foreign conflicts and terrorism, 36% of respondents favored Trump, compared to 29% in favor of Biden’s approach.
Switching gears, another commentary from the Huffington Post, certainly no friend of Donald Trump, joins the chorus of friendly reporters lining up to advise Joe Biden where he’s gone wrong.
Kevin Robillard headlines his op-ed “Joe Biden’s Most Potent Message Isn’t Reaching The Voters He’s Aiming For.”
And the reason why is “In painting the 2024 election as a democracy-or-bust binary choice, the president risks losing voters already dissatisfied with the status quo.”
It’s a very interesting analysis. I’m paraphrasing but Robillard’s argument essentially is that by pinning his hopes on painting Trump (as they say) as an “existential” threat to democracy, Biden is dramatically overshooting what ought to be his target.
At the end of Biden’s speech, delivered last Sunday at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia, Robillard noticed, “there was a clear divide: Morehouse’s alumni stood and applauded Biden’s speech while most students remained seated.”
The Democratic coalition depends on people of color—”mostly young, often Black or Latino, often male — who backed him in 2020 and are thus far refusing to do so in 2024.” However, Robillard maintains,
“These voters view the system as broken, sometimes irreparably so, and are not buying into a message Biden’s campaign often considers their trump, or anti-Trump, card: That another Biden presidency would save a democracy in peril. If Biden wants to defeat Trump, he may need to find a way to convince these voters he wants to change the system as much as he wants to defend it.”
Take that for what it’s worth, but it is another intriguing example of a Biden ally throwing what he believes is a life-preserver to a drowning candidacy.