As Allahpundit pointed out yesterday, the headline coming out of the latest NY Times poll wasn’t just that Biden was at an abysmal 33% approval, it was also that a majority of his own party, 64% of Dems, saying they’d rather see someone else run in 2024. Today the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake took a look at those numbers in historical context. While the exact question asked by the NY Times poll hasn’t been asked historically, Blake makes a convincing case that Democrats’ desire to be rid of Joe Biden may be unprecedented, at least since Jimmy Carter. Here’s the chart he produced by looking at previous polling.
As you can see, Biden is an outlier in terms of the desire of his own party to nominate someone else.
Neither Trump nor President Barack Obama saw supporters of their party ever entertain such a desire to turn the page. Whenever the question was asked about them, at least two-thirds said they wanted to renominate the incumbent president. (Even when Trump was highly unpopular overall, about 8 in 10 Republicans wanted to renominate him.) Biden, by contrast, has seen nearly two-thirds of his party say they want someone else…
About the closest we’ve come to significant numbers of a president’s base wanting to turn the page came in early 1995, shortly after President Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party got drubbed in the 1994 midterm elections. A CBS News poll in January 1995 showed 37 percent of Democrats preferred “someone else,” but 56 percent still wanted to renominate Clinton. But that’s still nowhere near Biden’s numbers…
About the closest analog to where Biden is right now is a June 1979 CBS News/New York Times poll that showed Democrats favored Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) over President Jimmy Carter 52-23. Another candidate got 8 percent. Carter went on to win renomination over Kennedy, anyway.
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Any time a presidency is inspiring Jimmy Carter comparison, it’s not going very well. In this case, Biden is arguably doing worse than Carter. In 1979, Ted Kennedy probably looked like an appealing substitute for Jimmy Carter to Democrats. But in the NY Times poll, Biden isn’t facing off with any actual alternative candidate, e.g. Hillary Clinton or Pete Buttigieg. He’s not looking less appealing because he’s standing next to someone the party finds more appealing. Instead, nearly two thirds of Democrats are just saying they’re interested in anyone but Biden.
Obviously inflation is a big part of this but I think the real reason is his age. Democrats have only recently been able to admit that what Republicans have been saying for months is obviously true: Biden has lost a step or two and it shows. He’s too old to be president now much less to run again in two years.
The really worrisome part of this is that Biden’s health could take a turn for the worse at any moment. Where he seems at least semi-competent now, one fall, one infection, almost anything could trigger something worse. And to be clear, I don’t wish Joe Biden ill. I don’t want to see him struggle with his health while in office. But most of us who are old enough to know about these things know that things do happen to men around 80 years old. I’ve seen it in my own family and I’ve seen it with elderly neighbors and in other families close to me. I think Democrats know it too which is why that chart above looks the way it does.
Update: Just saw this and it pretty much summarizes what I was trying to say above. Biden’s age is an outlier.
You sometimes hear the argument that presidents are almost always renominated so the speculation about whether Biden will be is silly, but Biden is also a *big* outlier in terms of age. We don’t really have any data for a case like this. pic.twitter.com/9u3qajoVDU
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 12, 2022
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