Joe Biden sinks to Hillary Clinton’s level of unpopularity
J.T. Young
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Currently, next year’s presidential race looks more like 2016’s than 2020’s. Even though it appears likely that President Joe Biden will face off against former President Donald Trump in a rematch, 2024 stands to be more of a rehash — only this time without Hillary.
After dramatically improving the Democrats’ results from years before, Biden has dug himself into a Hillary Clinton-sized pit in just three years. His record-low approval ratings among even Democratic primary voters leave his party with two questions: Are Democrats preparing for the right race? And can Biden dig himself out?
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In 2020, Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote and 306 electoral votes. Though his margin in each of the five pivotal states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) was less than 3 percentage points in terms of their popular votes, Biden’s results were a significant improvement over Clinton’s 2016 presidential performance.
Three years later, Biden’s numbers look very different. According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polling, Biden’s net approval rating is a negative 13.7%. The latest Gallup poll shows that the Democrats’ approval rating of Biden fell by 11 points last month to a historic low. Among independents, just 35% say they approve of Biden.
In RCP’s national average of polling on a hypothetical Biden-Trump rematch, Biden trails by 0.7 of a point: 44.1% to Trump’s 44.8%. Even at his peak in March of this year, Biden led Trump by only 45.5% to 44.2% — well below his 4.4-point margin in 2020.
Biden’s numbers now resemble Hillary’s from 2016.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by a 2.1-point margin, 48% to 45.9%. However, the five swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) that Biden won narrowly in 2020, Hillary lost narrowly in 2016. As a result, Clinton lost where it counted in the electoral vote, 232 to 306.
A closer look at today’s national polling numbers makes the similarity to 2016 even clearer. A recent series of state polling by Bloomberg-Morning Consult, for example, shows Biden now trailing Trump in four of the five swing states he won in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and tied in Michigan. In Arizona, Trump leads by 4 points, Trump leads by 5 points in Georgia, Trump leads by 1 point in Pennsylvania, and in Wisconsin, Trump leads by 2 points. If Trump holds the states he won in 2020 and holds these polling leads in these four states, he will win the presidency — regardless of what happens in the national popular vote.
What’s more, Trump’s polling margins in those states is almost identical to the popular vote margins he won there in 2016: 3.5 points in Arizona, 5.1 points in Georgia, 0.7 of a point in Pennsylvania, and 0.7 of a point in Wisconsin. All were close then and all are close now. And as both 2016 and 2020 prove, close still counts.
In effect, Biden has “Hillary’ed” himself. In three years, he has done what it took Hillary Clinton a quarter of a century to accomplish: He has made himself one of the most unpopular Democratic politicians in history.
Biden has done so through a litany of failures while in the White House. Economic growth has been tepid, while inflation has been torrid. Federal spending ballooned during COVID-19 and went up from there in Biden’s first year — it has never effectively deflated. Federal deficits and debt have responded accordingly.
Biden’s foreign policy has resulted in a string of high-profile disasters. Beginning with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration has overseen the breakout of two full-scale wars — one in Ukraine and now one in Israel following Iran-backed Hamas’s genocidal attack on our close ally.
Here at home, there is chaos on our open southern border and our unsafe urban streets. Both are the result of a Democratic standing-down of our law enforcement.
There is also failing school performance, which is the result of ideological indoctrination supplanting fundamental education. And there is Biden’s environmental policy that takes aim at seemingly every appliance on which the average person depends.
In short, the public has witnessed the radicalization of America’s government by Biden’s White House. His White House has been a government of the Left, by the Left, and for the Left — all at the expense of the rest of the country. The government has not simply failed in its basic function under Biden’s presidency. Rather, it appears not to even know what its basic functions are or should be.
The result for Biden is his poor polling numbers. And the result for Democrats is that they are running the wrong race: This is not 2020 all over again — it is 2016.
The question Democrats must ask themselves is whether Biden can undo the damage over the next year. The answer that should be most troubling to them is that Hillary could not.
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J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was the director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.