President Joe Biden's polling slide continues even as he ramps up a reelection bid and celebrates positive economic news.
Biden is preparing for battle with congressional Republicans over raising the debt ceiling and says his approval numbers are fine, but polls show his support slipping among nearly all corners of the electorate.
BIDEN LOOKS TO DEFY ABYSMAL POLLING IN 2024 REELECTION BID
“Every major president who won reelection, their polling numbers were where mine are now,” Biden said in a Friday evening MSNBC interview, implying he's teed up for a second term despite the numbers.
But the president suffered another blow two days later, when a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed his approval ratings at just 36%. The same poll found that 62% of respondents believe he's not physically healthy enough to serve, and that his support among black voters had dropped by 30 points since inauguration day, from 82% to 52%.
Perhaps most ominously for Biden, the poll found him trailing former President Donald Trump 44% to 38% and trailing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) 42% to 37%.
In his Friday evening interview, Biden pointed to the news, though not the news media, for his negative numbers.
"I think all they’ve heard is negative news for three years," he said. "Everything is negative. And I'm not being critical to the press. You turn on the television and the only way you’re going to get a hit is if there's something negative."
The Republican National Committee argued that Biden was speaking the truth, just not in the way he intended.
“Ironically, 'everything is negative' is actually an argument against his reelection,” RNC spokesman Tommy Pigott said. “Biden is struggling to make an argument for his reelection because his record is a disaster. Americans don’t want him to 'finish the job.'"
One of the most headline-grabbing aspects of the poll was that 27% of black respondents said they'd definitely or probably vote for Trump in 2024, or lean toward him. Trump won 12% of black voters in 2020.
Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Georgia, sounded several notes of caution about those figures. Gillespie points out that the survey likely has a small sample size of black respondents given that it only sampled 1,006 people overall, and that those respondents may not necessarily be voters.
"There are a lot of things in this survey that need additional data points before I can confirm the numbers we see here approximate the real-world numbers," she said. "I would caution people to understand that we are talking about a wide margin of error when we're talking about African American voters."
The poll was conducted from April 28 through May 3 with an overall margin of error of +/-3.5%.
There were wide discrepancies in the poll based on party affiliation, though they still skewed away from voter confidence in Biden. Just 21% of Democrats said he is not mentally fit for reelection, which jumped to 69% for independents and 94% for Republicans.
Biden frequently dusts off approval ratings with the adage, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." But this poll should give him pause, argues BJ Martino, president and CEO of The Tarrance Group.
"These are some of the most troubling numbers of the Biden 2024 candidacy," Martino said. "Any one poll can be an outlier. But I think the things that are more troubling are some of the underlying numbers."
Martino points to the numbers among suburban voters, a crucial battleground demographic in recent elections, as particularly troubling. Among those respondents, 63% said Biden lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, and 57% disapprove of the job he's doing.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
One of the biggest questions now is what the White House can do to change those perceptions.
"At this point, you'd think the White House would have a fundamental focus on doing things to change the voters' perception of his fitness for office," Martino said. "He hasn't taken many press conference questions. They tried to spin an MSNBC interview as a major engagement with the press, and voters see past that."