Will The Democratic Party Let Its Constituents Dump Joe Biden?

Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abject failure. This is certainly the impression one gets from looking at the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll results, which find that “more than 6 in 10 Americans (62 percent) say they would be ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘angry’ if Biden were reelected in 2024.” Just seven percent of voters say they are “enthusiastic” about Biden (one wonders who the seven percent are). Perhaps most astonishingly, the overwhelming majority of Democrats want to get rid of Biden.

So according to the Post’s polling, fewer than one-third of Democratic voters believe Joe Biden ought to be nominated for reelection, with most saying someone else ought to be nominated. (Republicans, as you can see, are split on Donald Trump, though slightly more people would presently prefer someone else.) The Washington Post tells us that the numbers are “statistically unchanged since last September,” meaning that people aren’t showing any signs of changing their minds and embracing Biden’s reelection. Last summer, the New York Times reported that “only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.” And no, the numbers have not substantially improved since then, with NBC news reporting that “the 71% of Americans in our latest NBC News poll saying the country is headed in the wrong direction is the eighth time in the last nine NBC News surveys dating back to Oct. 2021 when the wrong track has been above 70%,” concluding that “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.” I know nobody expected much of the Biden era, but even I am tempted to ask: how can you fuck things up that badly?