UPDATE (July 21, 2024 3:00 p.m. E.T.): President Joe Biden on Sunday announced that he is withdrawing his bid for re-election from the 2024 presidential race.
Things are looking grim for Joe Biden. The president has been trailing former President Donald Trump in the polls since last year, but he’s experiencing what appears to be a daunting new deficit after his atrocious performance at the first presidential debate. The outlook is so rough that some Democrats are openly warning that Biden’s unpopularity could even affect down-ballot races for Democrats, dampening their ability to either win the House or hold on to the Senate. The threat of such catastrophic results in November will likely increase pressure from within the party for Biden to step aside for another Democrat.
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., said Tuesday he believed Trump was on track “to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House.” Bennet’s willingness to make such a statement is bad news for Biden’s efforts to mollify the increasing number of dissenting Democratic lawmakers who are expressing concern about or outright objecting to his candidacy. He had chosen to debate Trump months earlier than such debates are normally held to catch up to Trump in the polls. That plan backfired spectacularly. Biden is now worse off than before the debate, and he faces a growing mutiny from lawmakers who fear not just his loss but also their own.
Biden is in a bind because there’s little he can do to turn the narrative around.
Polling averages aggregated by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics show Trump surged and Biden dipped significantly in national polls after the June 27 debate. The averages put Biden a few points behind Trump, which is not by any means insurmountable. But Biden should be trouncing Trump, a corrupt aspiring autocrat, one of the most unpopular people to ever run for presidential office and a man recently convicted of 34 felony counts and found liable for sexual abuse. Around this time in their 2020 match-up, Biden was beating Trump by almost 10 points. It’s also important to remember that in 2016 and 2020 Trump outperformed the polls. That he’s consistently leading Biden this election cycle is alarming.
Pollsters at the Cook Political report changed the status of three battleground states from toss-ups to “lean Republican” after the debate. And according to the combined data of the New York Times/Sienna College polls, Biden is seeing an extraordinary dip — Trump now has not just his biggest lead over Biden in this election cycle, but his largest lead over a Democrat since his 2016 White House bid. New York Times chief political correspondent and poll guru Nate Cohn told The New Yorker in a recent interview, “There are no precedents in recent memory for Presidents to have approval ratings like Biden’s who then go on to win re-election.”
Bennett isn’t the only Democratic lawmaker to suggest that Biden’s popularity could drag down senators and representatives in their races, especially in purple states. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who’s running for the Senate, expressed confidence Sunday in Democratic House and Senate candidates for now, noting that “they are running well ahead of the president,” but he expressed a note of caution that “you can only run so far ahead of the president.” Schiff also said the race between Biden and Trump “should not be even close, and the reason it is close is the president’s age.” University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock said that in the battleground state of Georgia, Biden’s unpopularity “could be a problem” for Democratic challengers looking to flip districts. Biden is in a bind because there’s little he can do to turn the narrative around. Pollsters continue to find that his key vulnerability is the long-held perception that he’s too old for the job — and some surveys even find that voters find it more concerning than Trump’s criminal charges. Biden can do a lot to try to connect more with voters, but he can’t become younger, and, thus, he can’t do anything about his most glaring vulnerability. Democrats are correct to worry that Biden’s weak standing in polls bodes poorly for not only his re-election prospects, but also for their prospects in elections across his entire party. That could be what pushes some lawmakers who are on the fence about to press him to step aside.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
