There’s a lot going on in the Republican presidential primary as we finally move into the first stages of the campaign, but it’s worth remembering just how awful things are going for the guy who currently inhabits the White House.
Bolstering that framing is a new CNN poll, which even Jake Tapper described as “horrible” for Joe Biden during a segment on Thursday.
You know things are bad when CNN leads both its television coverage and online write-up with the fact that Biden still leads the Democratic Party primary because last I checked, there is no Democratic Party primary. The DNC has already announced there will be no debates, Biden isn’t campaigning at all, and it’s just a matter of time before some states cancel their primaries altogether. So yes, the president leads a hypothetical match-up with a nutjob who once called for the execution of “climate deniers,” but that isn’t offering any comfort for Democrats who know they are staring at oblivion.
Rest assured, oblivion is the right word to use there. In the poll, 66 percent of respondents described a would-be Biden reelection as either a “setback” or a “disaster.”
Just a third of Americans say that Biden winning in 2024 would be a step forward or a triumph for the country (33%). At the same time, the survey finds a decline in favorable views of Biden over the past six months, from 42% in December to 35% now. And results from the same poll released earlier this week showed Biden’s approval rating for handling the presidency at 40%, among the lowest for any first-term president since Dwight Eisenhower at this point in their term.