OPINION:
President Biden has a difficult climb ahead. The aged head of state, who aims to win a second term in November, is singularly unpopular with the Americans he is counting on to reelect him in the campaign year that has only just begun.
Mr. Biden returned Tuesday from his holiday vacation to a popularity crater deeper than that of any modern predecessor. A Gallup Poll taken last month placed the president’s approval rating at 39%, lower than Barack Obama’s 43% and Donald Trump’s 45%.
The adversity, inflamed by the glow of the 81 candles on his recent birthday cake, only serves to remind voters that Mr. Biden is nine years older than the reputedly superannuated Ronald Reagan was when he sought his second term as president.
Worse, while Reagan was riding the crest of a conservative sea change in 1984 that inundated every state but Minnesota, the “progressive” tide that carried Mr. Biden into office in 2020 is arguably ebbing.
The president’s headlong approval tumble among young Americans serves as a harbinger. NBC News polling reveals a sudden decline in Mr. Biden’s job approval rating among voters ages 18 to 34, from 46% in September to 31% in November, mostly attributed to the president’s on-again, off-again support for Israel in its war with Hamas.
The same youthful disillusionment is evident in a Jan. 1 USA Today survey revealing that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, leads Mr. Biden 37% to 35% among voters under 35 in a prospective head-to-head matchup. Equally striking, the poll shows the president’s support among Black voters crashing from 87% to 63% since 2020, and his backing among Hispanics plummeting from 65% to 34%.
Gallup found government and immigration most frequently cited as root causes of dissatisfaction with the president’s job performance, with respondents pointing to each of these issues 16% of the time. Only the economy in general, at 14%, and inflation specifically, at 12%, came close. Like “Bidenomics,” the president’s signature policy package that has saddled the nation with an annual interest debt nearing $1 trillion, these troublesome concerns are all stamped with the Biden brand.
The Biden Justice Department’s unprecedented attempt to jail a main political rival using insurrection innuendo prior to the November election also plays into Mr. Biden’s historic unpopularity. The scheme of state-level fellow travelers to strike their Republican nemesis from primary ballots only serves to remind voters that this Democratic candidate is the least democratic candidate ever.
Americans’ umbrage is not unreasonable: The 2023 Electoral Integrity Project, an annual study conducted jointly by the Royal Military College of Canada and Britain’s University of East Anglia, ranked the United States alongside Mexico in 64th place among 169 nations for perceptions of election integrity — hardly an exalted position for one of the world’s longest-enduring republics.
President Biden has time to turn around the ebbing progressive drift, but not much. “Time and tide wait for no man,” observed the venerable English bard Geoffrey Chaucer, and all the more so for an aged one.
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