The American Dream is dying faster than Biden's frontal cortex.
The percentage of voters who believe in the American dream, the idea that working hard brings more success, has dramatically decreased over the past decade, according to a poll published on Friday.
About a third of voters, 36%, said the once-popular ethos holds true, per the poll, which was conducted in October by the Wall Street Journal and University of Chicago.
That is roughly half of the percentage who believed in the American dream last year, the Wall Street Journal found. Similar polls found that a majority of voters, 53%, believed in the American dream in 2012 and that 46% believed in it in 2016.
The poll defined the American dream as the idea that "if you work hard, you'll get ahead." It also asked voters whether life in America is better or worse today than 50 years ago and whether the economic and political systems are "stacked against" them.
Exactly half of the respondents in both instances conveyed pessimism. Fifty percent said America is worse off today, and 50% said the economic and political systems were stacked against them.
Those who no longer believed in the American dream associated with both major political parties. Women and younger people were more disillusioned by the sentiment than men and older people.
Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) on Saturday criticized President Biden for his recent poll numbers, arguing it's "delusional" to think he could overtake former President Trump in a rematch.
"As a member of House Democratic Leadership, I supported and promoted the Biden agenda, Phillips wrote Saturday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "I campaigned for him, voted for him, and respect him."
"But how can anyone read this and conclude he's positioned to defeat Donald Trump?" he added, sharing an article from Politico centered on Biden's fall in approval ratings. "It's delusional."
The article from Politico referenced there shows Biden's job approval losing cognitive acuity.
Biden's recent slide -- and his political predicament some 11 months before Election Day -- represent a confluence of slippage with reliable Democratic constituencies like young voters, the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the rise of independent and third-party candidates who could siphon votes from both Biden and Trump.
This week's NBC News poll had a stunning result: Trump led Biden among voters younger than 35, 46 percent to 42 percent.
Even though that was well within the high margin of error for such a small subgroup, other polls also show a close race with what has been a reliable Democratic constituency. Biden had only single-digit leads among voters 18-34 in polls this month from Morning Consult (Biden +2), Fox News (Biden +7) and Quinnipiac University (Biden +9). (Trump led Biden in all four polls among all voters.)
Only a few polls show Biden with a lead among young voters that approaches his 2020 margins, but they are the exception, not the rule.
That's prompted a debate over whether Trump is really making the deep inroads with younger voters the polling suggests -- or if those numbers are an artifact of some kind of polling bias. One popular theory speculates that liberal younger voters who are unenthusiastic about Biden and his party -- over his administration's support for Israel in its war with Hamas, for example -- aren't participating in polls right now, even if many of them will vote for him next November.
But Biden, the oldest president in history, has never polled well with younger voters. And telephone polls -- of the four mentioned above, all but Morning Consult were conducted over the phone -- are a difficult way to reach younger voters.
Biden's approval ratings are headed downward, while Trump's vote share is spiking.
Biden's sagging margins against Trump are one thing. But there are two other trendlines under the hood of these polls that spell trouble for the incumbent.
First, his approval rating -- already historically low for a president at this point in his first term -- has been ticking down. Biden's approval rating dipped down to 38 percent in FiveThirtyEight's average earlier this month, the lowest since July 2022. Similarly, when Biden hit 40 percent in RealClearPolitics' average this month, it was his lowest reading since August 2022.
I saw a clip of Laura Ingraham talking with former Democrat strategist and current Fox commentator Doug Schoen. Schoen believes it's possible that Biden will consult with his "family" (his donors and handlers, I assume that means) over the holidays and announce he's decided not to run again. Schoen believes, however, that the back-up candidate will be Kamala Harris, because the woke core of the party will not permit a black woman to be disrespected and thrown aside.
Kamala Harris is of course more unpopular than Joe Biden.