Where Does Biden Stand Before the 2020 White House Come Back Trail? An Empirical Study of Biden’s Popularity and Democratic Inflation

For the last month or so, the dominant narrative in American politics has been that President Joe Biden – and Democrats more generally – are on the comeback trail.

The GOP is in a strong position to win the House of Representatives while the Democrat-run Senate will go down to the wire. A Republican triumph in either chamber would severely curtail Biden’s domestic presidency and set up an acrimonious two years of political standoffs ahead of the 2024 White House race.

At the same time, the poll finds multiple measures of Biden’s popularity improving. Overall favorable views of the president stand at 42% favorable to 52% unfavorable. It’s a negative rating, but a shift toward the positive since this summer when only 36% held a favorable view. Biden’s approval rating went up from 40% just before the election to 45% after the results were released. Nearly two-thirds of adults say that Biden’s views and policies are generally mainstream, which is similar to the CNN poll in late summer 2021.

Where does Biden rank historically at this point in his presidency? Using Gallup’s awesome presidential job approval center, we can track where recent Biden’s recent predecessors stood in the final stretch before the midterm election in their first term.

The president is in a better political shape at the end of the year, than Trump is. Only 25% of Democrat-aligned voters wanted him to be their nominee. Now that figure is 40%. And among those who want someone else, 72% say they’ve got no one particular in mind, further bolstering the advantage a sitting president usually has against a primary challenger.

The most important factor is that a lot of voter groups for Democrats are less focused on the issues where public concerns about Bidens performance are greatest, and more focused on the issues where they are worried about Republicans. The blue team is concerned with abortion, democracy and crime, while the red team is concerned with inflation and immigration, says a long-time GOP pollster. “And there’s obviously a little overlap, particularly on the inflation front. We have become so close that the two different teams care about the same things.

The left is uneasy with the strategy. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged the White House to do more to stress economic concerns in recent weeks even while acknowledging the crisis of democracy and the importance of abortion rights. Democrats were slow to realize that a good time over the summer wouldn’t last long enough to remedy the political environment caused by the economy.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a Democratic group that focuses on campaigns and candidates of color, says that stressing the risk to abortion rights still can increase turnout among liberal-leaning groups, like young single women, who might otherwise sit out a midterm election. But she largely agrees that most of the persuadable voters who might move to Democrats around the abortion issue have already done so and that the party during the campaign’s final stretch must ensure it has a competitive message on the economy and other daily concerns. “The reality is everybody is always going to be focused on the things that are affecting their everyday life,” she says. “I think it’s a false choice to be thinking about: is it the economy or is it abortion?”

The Democrat has outspent his Republican opponent by a significant margin and they both occupied the center of the campaign. But Noble also believes that Kelly is surmounting disenchantment with Biden in part because some voters are already looking past the president as they assess the parties. “The [president’s] job approval, for whatever reason, is not having as much effect,” Noble says. “People have accepted it’s Joe Biden, and pat him on the head, push him along, so you are not seeing that direct connection” to the Senate vote.

Senate candidates who are from the president’s party have only won races in states with low approval ratings before. According to exit polls, Republicans lost all 10 Senate races in states where Trump’s approval was less than 50%. In the 2010 Republican sweep, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where exit polls placed Barack Obama’s approval rating at 47% of less; only Harry Reid in Nevada (where Obama stood at 46%) and Joe Manchin in West Virginia (who, rather incredibly, carried a state where just 30% of voters approved of Obama’s performance) surmounted that tide. In 2006 Republicans lost 19 of the 20 Senate races in states where exit polls gave George W. Bush a lower approval rating.

Inflation, Pre-Kirchhoff, and the Democratic Party: The Role of Politics in Countering Trump’s Manifesto

The economy was called Inflation’s top issue by a small majority of voters, and 8 in 10 voters said inflation was a hardship for them personally. By roughly a 12-point margin, voters said they trusted the GOP over the Democratic Party to handle inflation.

Given these disparities, Democrats everywhere are stressing issues relating to rights and values, particularly abortion, but also warning about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his movement. According to a recent report, Democrats have spent more on ads related to abortion than any other party.

In the long run, the most important of these may be the argument that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the trio of central Biden legislative accomplishments – the bills to rebuild infrastructure, promote semiconductor manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy – will produce a boom in US employment, particularly in manufacturing jobs that don’t require a college degree.

But those plant openings are mostly still in the future and only a few Democrats (such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona Sen. Kelly, and Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan) are emphasizing those possibilities this year.

More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says that highlighting such specific initiatives can allow individual candidates to overcome the negative overall judgment on Biden’s economic management. He is worried that Democrats are too focused on abortion when talking about the economy.

Democrats are trying to build up a sea wall against the currents of economic discontent based on the coming manufacturing boom, cost-saving provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the case that they are offering struggling families opportunities to better their condition. But the campaign’s final weeks will measure whether that current reaches a level that breaches all of the party’s defenses.

The Hispanics of the United States: Biden’s Unpopularity, Trump’s Negativity, and the Ubiquity of the White House

A majority of Hispanic voters disapproved of Mr. Biden but they were not willing to vote for the Republicans this fall because they were unhappy with the White House.

College was the dividing line. Democrats held a 13-point advantage among those with a bachelor’s degree. Republicans had a 15-point edge among those who did not have one.

In taking over the House in 2018 and winning the Senate and White House in 2020, the winning Democratic coalition during the Trump presidency relied on a significant gender gap and on winning women by a wide margin.

But the poll showed that Republicans had entirely erased what had been an 11-point edge for Democrats among women last month in 2022 congressional races to a statistical tie in October.

Trump has not seen a change in his favorability rating. Just 31% in the new poll rate him positively, the smallest share to do so since before he was elected president, while 60% hold an unfavorable view. And a broad majority say they see Trump’s views and policies as too extreme – 68% say so, including 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – while only 32% see the former president as generally mainstream.

Biden is in a strong position to win the Democratic presidential nomination in four years. Trump, on the other hand, finds his position among Republicans not only weakened by the midterm results, but he actually trails in a number of polls to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a potential GOP primary.

Today, the mood of the nation is decidedly sour. 64 percent of likely voters see the country in the wrong direction, compared to 24 percent who think the nation is on the right track. The Democratic share of likely voters who believe that the nation is heading in the right direction has fallen since September, but it is above the low point of the summer.

“Everybody’s hurting right now,” said David Neiheisel, a 48-year-old insurance salesman and Republican in Indianapolis. The costs of gas, food, and utilities have all gone up so much that it is going to collapse.

The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and Republicans Can Keep Up). CNN Observations of the 2016 Midterm Election

The Times/Siena survey of 792 likely voters nationwide was conducted by telephone using live operators from Oct. 9 to 12, 2022. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. Cross-tabs and methodology are available here.

Editor’s Note: Kristen Soltis Anderson, a CNN Political commentator, is a Republican strategist and pollster and author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up.)” Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. Read more opinion articles on CNN.

I guess if you do not know, the meme of “Dark Brandon” is an all-powerful hero or villain for most people. It was a right-wing phrase before Democrats appropriated it to praise the President.

The meme reached the height of its powers, whatever those may be, when the Democratic group Building Back Together released a hallucinogenic 30-second ad earlier this month featuring the meme of President Biden, lasers coming out of his eyes and all. The message? Biden is an exciting and successful hero on issues like student loan debt. If you are unacquainted with Biden and the Democratic Party, please do not be.

But even though Millennials and Gen Z Americans tend to lean leftward on a host of economic and cultural issues such as LGBTQ rights and the size of government, it is clear that in this midterm election, Democrats have not energized the youth vote and may not be able to count on young people as a key part of their coalition.

However, my own firm’s analysis suggests that voters under the age of 30 could fall to only 10% of the electorate in 2022 –a year where we expect overall turnout to be historic for a midterm at over 125 million votes.

What is especially troublesome for Democrats is that this is all happening against a backdrop of young Americans being increasingly vocal about their politics. Companies are grappling with Gen Z and Millennial employees who seem keener than ever to work for employers that align with their political and cultural worldview. Younger consumers are voting with their money when choosing products and services, and business leaders know that, according to me.

The control of the US Senate will be decided next week in cross-pressured states, where most voters don’t like President Joe Biden and the state’s Republican Senate nominee.

A group of independents in the middle is the real question, says Paul Maslin a long-time Democratic pollster. “Is it people saying, ‘I hate inflation, crime is wrecking this big city I live in,’ or people saying, ‘I’m sorry but Herschel Walker is a clown, Mehmet Oz is a clown. … Blake Masters is a joke,’ and they go back to [the Democrats]? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Democratic hopes over the summer that Biden’s approval rating would steadily rise through Election Day, lifting their candidates in the process, have been dashed largely because of the persistence of the highest inflation in 40 years.

According to a political scientist at an american university, democrats have a problem since they have not gotten better in people’s eyes despite what they have done. They would be in better shape if the inflation had come down from where it is. It is not possible to convince people that things are going better if they know that it is not.

“Over the past twenty or thirty years, what we’ve seen is a growing nationalization of these congressional races where there is a closer connection between opinions about national issues and national political leaders and how people vote in these House and Senate elections,” says Abramowitz. It used to be easier for an incumbent to run far ahead of a president from their own party, based on their reputation in their state and district, name recognition, and other perks, which you gain from being an incumbent. Over time that value has decreased.”

So far, public polls show Democratic Senate candidates meeting that test to varying degrees. In the latest round of CNN state surveys conducted by SSRS in mid-October, for instance, Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly in Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, as well as challengers Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania were all winning at least 11% of voters who disapproved of Biden and losing no more than 4% of voters who approved of his performance. Kelly captured almost one-fifth of voters who disapproved of Biden against Masters. The Siena polls released Monday showed Democrats winning about 15% of voters who disapproved of Biden in Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, while nearly one-fourth of them in Arizona.

Since he defeated former President Donald J. Trump in 2020, Mr. Biden has had difficulty conjuring a useful political villain, in part because Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. For much of his first year, Mr. Biden seemed to be fighting more with his own party — specifically, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia — than with Republicans.

Even though they were attracting double-digit support from voters who did not approve of Biden, the CNN mid- October polls showed that Masto was still narrowly trailing. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, says he believes the final electorate will tilt even more toward Republican voters dissatisfied with Biden than polls now project. He argues that, in the end, apathy with current conditions and Biden’s performance will increase turnout for Republicans and depress turnout for Democrats, than most models now anticipate. The composition of the electorate will crush everything, he says.

Such exceptions have become rare in modern US politics. Democrats will probably need a lot more than they have because of Biden’s weak standing in so many places.

The Energy of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the Dynamics of a Possible 2020 Reelection Run: Two Presidential Campaigns in Philadelphia, Washington, and Los Angeles

Three presidents – one sitting and two former – descend on Pennsylvania Saturday for a final-stretch midterm push that underscores the stakes of one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.

For President Joe Biden, who will hold a rare joint appearance with former President Barack Obama in Philadelphia meant to boost the Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania will amount to a political stress test in his home state, where he’s traveled 20 times since taking office.

For former President Donald Trump, who rallies outside of Pittsburgh in the city of Latrobe, a win by his hand-selected candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz could prove his own enduring viability in a commonwealth he lost by a narrow margin in 2020.

The consequences extend well beyond next week’s election. As Trump prepares to announce a third presidential bid, Biden’s aides are taking their own initial steps toward mounting a reelection campaign. For a several-hour stretch on Saturday afternoon, the dynamics of a potential 2020 rematch will be laid bare.

The moment marks a historic anomaly. Former presidents usually stay away from direct criticism of the men occupying the office they once held. In 1892 a defeated president returned to win the White House for a second time.

When he took office six years ago, Trump quickly started issuing false accusations against the Obama administration, and now is warning of dire consequences should the other party prevail.

Still, his events haven’t generated the same electricity as Obama’s. The former president has laid into Trump and his acolytes who are running for office during his string of rallies across the country over the past weeks, using stinging humor and an air of bemusement to ridicule Republicans.

Obama criticized the cast of candidates backed by Trump, many of whom deny the 2020 election results and have modeled themselves after him.

It doesn’t work out just because someone is on TV. Being governor is more than just lines and good lighting, President Barack Obama said last week while campaigning in Arizona for his re-election.

The final days of the campaign drew bigger crowds to his rallies. The White House says that hundreds of people were turned away from an event in Southern California. And Biden addressed an overflow crowd in New Mexico that couldn’t fit inside the main venue when he was holding a rally with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

That’s a 180-degree turn from midterm cycles during Obama’s presidency, when it was Biden venturing to more states – including conservative-leaning districts – where the sitting president was considered a drag on Democratic candidates.

Still, their joint appearance Saturday will only serve to underscore their divergent styles and political abilities – a comparison even some Democrats say ultimately favors Obama.

The Stress on the Threat posed by Donald Trump: What Do We Want to Do Now? How Are We Going to Win? Why Did Biden Tell Barack Obama?

I know you ask how we are doing. We’re going to win this time around I think. I feel really good about our chances,” Biden told reporters Friday in California.

He has grown frustrated with coverage suggesting he is political albatross and believes his policies are popular with voters.

Voters will be asked to prioritize the historic foundation of America’s political system over their economic fears because of the Stress on the Threat posed by Trump by Biden.

Obama and Biden last appeared together at the White House in September, when Obama’s official portrait was unveiled in the White House East Room. The event had been put off while Trump was in office, partly because neither the Obamas nor the Trumps were interested in putting on a show of friendship.

Donald Trump is running for president in 2024. He has started to roll out the same kind of anti-establishment vitriol, centered on the war against the world message that he deployed successfully in 2016 against a crowded field of Republican challengers. He comes to the campaign trail with a lot more baggage than he did in the first place. He faces multiple investigations and the possibility that the Department of Justice will move forward with criminal charges referred to them by the House January 6 committee. (Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has diminished the investigations as politically motivated, calling them a “witch hunt.”)

If the Republicans do well in the elections, it would be a good time for Trump to begin his campaign in the third week of November.

Corint: He says that he doesn’t feel rushed either way, regardless of what Trump does. By historical standards, Trump’s announcement is very early. And one factor that the White House must be weighing here – and Biden’s advisers – is that there are a lot of polls that show Democrats are not that excited about him running again. When I was out interviewing voters last month, many of them brought up concerns about Biden’s age, unprompted. They said that he does not get a lot of credit. I would ask, “Do you want him to run again?” And there would often just be these painfully long pauses and a lot of ums and ahs.

The Pain of Joe Biden: The Inflaton-Delta, Crime, Education-Desensirability Scenario

Democrats close their election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario that they always feared, with Republicans staging a referendum on Joe Bidens presidency and failure to tame inflation.

It is too early to conduct postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

A clear picture of GOP strength can be found in the swathe of blue territory that Democrats are defending.

A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

“Here’s where the Democrats are: they’re inflation deniers, they are crime deniers, they’re education deniers,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I think that we didn’t listen to voters in this election. I think we are going to have a bad night, that’s what I believe.

On Tuesday, this conversation is not going to have a noticeable impact, but I hope it has an impact in the future because voters will tell you over and over again that they care mostly about the economy. Stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. The tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents had been disrupted by Trump’s inciting insurrection.

But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. Millions of voters are hurting and haven’t heard a plan from the president to quickly ease prices.

This is the big economic question that will impact the way voters are feeling about the state of the union. The economy has become the main problem for the Biden administration, with rising prices making people feel bad about their grocery shopping and causing turmoil in the stock market. As the Federal Reserve ramped up interest rates, the chances of recession increased. There are many indications that inflation might finally be cooling down, which would allow the Fed to pull back and create more pocketbook stability in family budgets. But should inflation continue to dog the economy – or should a recession set in – the administration will certainly struggle at the ballot box in 2024.

Republicans claim that Mr. Biden lied about their intentions. Many, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, say they are not willing to consider any proposals to cut funding for Medicare and Social Security to pay for desired reductions in the nation’s debt and deficit. When Mr. Biden suggested the opposite Tuesday night, Republicans erupted in boos.

And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. With the Federal Reserve in charge, the central bank’s decision to rise interest rates could cause a recession that will haunt Biden’s presidency.

Inflation and high gas prices are also a global issue and have been worsened by factors beyond Biden’s control, including the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, however, economists are debating the wisdom of Biden’s high-spending bills that sent billions of dollars into an overheating economy. And the White House’s repeated downplaying of the soaring cost of living as “transitory” badly misjudged the situation and was another thing that battered Biden’s credibility – on top of the confidence some voters lost in him during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

Then came the 2022 midterms. Although Republicans will likely gain control of at least one chamber of Congress, if not both by narrow margins, the GOP will be frustrated. By inserting himself into the race and endorsing a slate of candidates, Trump managed to make the midterms partly a mandate about him rather than the sitting president. Many of his hand-selected candidates, moreover, lost, such as Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.

Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. A number of election deniers are poised to take office in state offices in Tuesday’s election and control the next presidential election in several key battlegrounds. GOP control of state legislatures could affect voting rights.

The Rise and Fall of K.D. Biden, the Future of the House, and the End of the McCain-McCarlo Crisis

High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

Republicans are increasingly bullish on winning big in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they slam Democrats over raging inflation and crime while President Joe Biden seeks a late reprieve by warning that GOP election deniers could destroy democracy.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, the potential next Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, laid out his plans for power and vowed to tackle inflation, border security and rising crime. He promised broad investigations against the Biden administration on the Afghanistan withdrawal, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and how the administration has dealt with parents and school board meetings. And he didn’t rule out an eventual push to impeach Biden.

In a sign of the critical stakes and the growing angst among Democrats, four presidents – Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton – all took to the campaign trail over the weekend.

The ex-president is close to making a bid for the White House in four years, and is scheduled to hold a rally for J.D. Vance in Ohio on Monday. In a speech that concluded in pouring rain for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on Sunday, Trump predicted voters would “elect an incredible slate of true MAGA warriors to Congress.”

Biden, who spent Saturday getting out the vote in the critical Pennsylvania Senate race with Obama, warned that the nation’s core values are in peril from Republicans who denied the truth about the US Capitol insurrection and following the brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.

The president will end his effort to stave off a rebuke from voters at a Democratic event in Maryland. The fact that he will be in a liberal bastion and not trying to boost an endangered lawmaker in a key race on the final night reflects his compromised standing in an election that has reverted to a referendum on his tattered credibility and low approval ratings.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/election-eve-campaigning/index.html

Did a Republican Candidate Come to Face-to-Face with Donald Trump during the First National Voting Campaign? The Case of Republican Senator Ronna McDaniel

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party would win both the House and the Senate and accused Biden of being oblivious to the economic anxiety among Americans with his repeated warnings about democracy.

“Look, they’re all about the wealthier getting wealthy. The wealthier are staying rich. The middle class gets stiffed. The poor get poorer under the policies of the government.

The first national vote after the chaos and violence triggered by Trump refusing to accept the result of the last presidential election are occurring in the coming weeks, and there are fears that Republican candidates will try to follow his example if they don’t win. Ron Johnson has raised concerns about the vote.

On Sunday, a staffer opened a letter containing suspicious white powder which had been sent from the headquarters of the candidate for Arizona governor. Lake’s opponent, current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, condemned the incident as “incredibly concerning.”

While DeSantis, for instance, has impressed conservative voters by seizing on hot button culture war issues like immigration, transgender rights, anti-Covid 19 measures and supposed voter fraud, he has not yet come face-to-face with Trump. The Florida governor, who won an easy reelection race last month, has not said whether he will run against Trump, who set him up in his first gubernatorial race with an endorsement. But a string of primary debate clashes with Trump would test his capacity to take a blow, his ability to think on his feet and his willingness to counter-attack a former president who still benefits from a personality cult among GOP base voters.

But the Florida governor chose not to engage, turning his ire instead on Biden and calling his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, “a donkey” while taking credit for defying Washington officials and experts during the pandemic.

The possibility of a presidential run by Trump was teased as he took part in a rally for one of his political opponents. In another sign the next presidential race is heating up, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton announced that he wouldn’t run in the Republican primary.

Former President Bill Clinton was also called into action on Saturday, stumping for New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in Brooklyn. The Empire state should be safe territory for his party but Hochul’s closer-than-expected reelection race against Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin underscores the toughness of the national environment for Democrats.

“I know the average election rally is just ‘whoop dee doo do vote for me,’ but your life is on the line. For young people in the audience, your life is on the line,” Clinton said.

A Tale of Two Battles for a Republican Candidate in the House of Representatives: The Case of Sen. J. Biden

It’s possible that the Republicans will impose a vise on Biden’s legislative program and set up a series of political battles if they win back the House. They are promising a relentless round of investigations and hearings into everything from the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the surge in migrants across the southern border to Biden’s son, Hunter.

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including his forthcoming co-edited work, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). You can follow the man on social media. His own views are reflected in this commentary. CNN has opinions on it.

Biden deserves a lot of credit. As Nate Cohn explained on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” Democratic success came in regions of the country where concerns over the health of the democracy and reproductive rights helped drive turnout. In the closing days of the campaign, Biden emphasized the need to protect democracy, even as some pollsters said inflation would be their main concern.

The CNN/SSRS poll we did earlier this month shows that Trump’s popularity among Republicans has fallen, and he is no longer the favorite among those in his party.

If Biden becomes the party’s nominee, some Democrats who are against a second term for him say they would back him. A half of Democratic-aligned voters would definitely vote for Biden if he were to become the nominee and another 22% would likely back him. All told, 86% of Democrats either support Biden for the nomination or say they would likely vote for him in the general election if he were the nominee.

But “watch me” alone isn’t going to assuage voters’ doubts, which primarily center on Biden’s age. After watching Biden in office for over two years, most voters don’t think he should run again. So there it is.

Mr. Biden wanted to show his supporters that he had the ability to win the presidential nomination even if they wanted someone from a new generation. After a few stumbles at the beginning, the president turned energetic and combative, and even showed moments of humor and effective off-the cuff retorts to Republican hecklers.

Doubts about Biden’s ability to serve a second term are a persistent problem, not just a one-off from the exit polling. And one that Biden and his team have to figure out how to address becausevoters need to know about him.

It’s not certain which party will control the Senate or the House of Representatives next year with votes still being counted, and important races too early to call. The Republicans wanted a “red wave” in 2022, but it did not happen.

This was the only time this midterm was unique because of abortion. Only a small number of voters said high inflation was important to them in the exit poll. A nearly identical percentage (27%) said abortion, and these voters overwhelmingly chose Democratic candidates for Congress.

Perhaps the lack of success by these GOP candidates shouldn’t be a surprise given that some 60% of voters – both in pre-election surveys and the exit polls – believe Biden was legitimately elected.

CNN exit polls are a mix of in-person interviews with voters on Election Day and in-person interviews with early and by-mail voters. They were conducted for the National Election Pool. This is where you can read more.

What Did the Early 1920s and 2020s Tell Us About President Franklin Roosevelt and the Reforms of the House Intelligence and Investigation of the Presidential Campaign?

The opposition party is supposed to do well during the mid-terms. That should especially be the case when there is once-in-a-generation inflation and when the vast majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

So just what happened? It is clear that voters punished Republicans for being too extreme on issues like abortion and for being too connected to the former President Donald Trump.

The most significant achievements of 1934, 1962 and 2002 are thought to be monumental achievements for the president and the party in control of the White House.

We don’t have any polling from 1934, even though Franklin Roosevelt won two landslide victories during that time, so he was popular.

Many of those Republicans were endorsed by Trump and had said (at least at one point) that they believed he had won the 2020 election. (This, of course, is false, as Biden won the election.)

We see this in gubernatorial elections, as well. In a number of blue or swing states, Republicans nominated 2020 election deniers for governor. None of them has been projected a winner, and only Republican Kari Lake of Arizona has any chance of winning.

The fact that the current president and the former president are unpopular is not unusual. Both Obama and George W. Bush were unpopular before the 2010 midterm.

It’s obvious that the difference between 2010 and 2022 is due to the same reason. I said thatTrump was getting more search traffic than Biden, and that voters thought of Biden more than Trump. Bush was not getting as much search traffic as Obama was.

This matches the dynamic we saw in the special House elections following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June. Democrats started doing considerably better than before the Supreme Court ruling.

And while Republicans somewhat recovered their standing in national House polls in the closing weeks of the campaign, they never made it back to where they were during the spring.

Tamara Keith: President Biden’s Decision to Run for reelection in 2024 and What he’s planning to do

President Biden is spending Thanksgiving with family in Nantucket. He has said he will talk with his family over the holidays about whether to act on his intention to run again in 2024.

There were lots of big conversations at the Thanksgiving table last night involving major life decisions, such as whether to run for a second term as president. We’re joined now by NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith, who is reporting on President Biden’s deliberations about whether to run for reelection in 2024.

KEITH: Anita Dunn, who is a longtime adviser to Biden and is also a top White House official, was asked about it at an event recently put on by the publication Axios.

ANITA DUNN: His decision to run in 2020 came after a family meeting that was actually, as he posed it, called by his grandchildren. Pop’s got to have this conversation. The family is going to be deeply involved in whatever decision he reaches because that’s who he is.

DUNN: We should be in the Political Malpractice Hall of Fame because we are engaged in some planning for this year, and if we weren’t, we wouldn’t have time to plan.

MARTÍNEZ: When Donald Trump announced that he was going to run in 2024, I think everyone did a collective look toward D.C. to see exactly what President Biden was planning on doing.

The Araucaria Project: CNN Investigates the Future of the NPR Experiment. Anti-Trump Candidates in the Republican Party

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may be revised or updated in the future. It’s possible that accuracy and availability are different. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

According to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, most of the voters in both parties would rather see a new nominee in the presidential election of four years from now.

There is a chance that the lowest point of the three CNN polls will be used by an anti-Trump candidate. One big field could splinter the opposition to the ex-president.

About half of Republican-aligned voters (52%) say that Trump has had a good effect on the Republican Party, down from 69% who felt that way in March 2021. A third (33%) say he’s had a bad effect, and 15% that he hasn’t made much difference.

Almost three-quarters of Democrats say they want someone else to be the party’s nominee. 5% of those who do name another candidate mention Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The 2016 CNN Poll: Is Donald Trump Ready to Move On? The Case for a Difficult-Meaning Presidential Candidate

This CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS on December 1 through 7 among a random national sample of 1,208 adults drawn from a probability-based panel. The surveys were done online or on the phone. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is 3.6 points, larger for subgroup.

Even as President Joe Biden and ex-President Donald Trump move toward a rerun of the most turbulent White House race in modern history, many voters are pining for a break from the past – and the present.

Whether voters want it or not the race is on. Early perceptions of the contenders’ strengths are important since they shape the decisions of potential rivals and donors in the early money chase. Trump is already a declared candidate, although he could use a relaunch after a tepid start, and Biden is giving every sign he plans on running, suggesting he’ll let the country know for sure early in the new year.

Republican politics may, or may not, be at a moment of transition. How things shake out in the next few months will be critical to Trump’s prospects. On the one hand, more and more Republicans – prompted by the failure of many of the ex-president’s hand-picked candidates in the midterms – are saying it’s time to move on.

There is a case that the viability of his general election candidacy is damaged beyond repair because of Trump’s dinner with Extremists with a Record of Antisemitism. It appears that Trump’s lackluster campaign was declared to make it easier for him to portray criminal probes into his conduct as persecution.

How Do the Greenes Live and Work in 2020? The Case for the Biden-Biden Legacy of the Gingrich Era

With Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia emerging as a significant voice in the House Republican caucus, anything goes in 2023. Republicans helped boost the standing of disgraced former President Bill Clinton, as his approval ratings skyrocketed, even as Democrats fought the party in the 1990s. Americans thought the House GOP was too radical and extreme to govern. The current House Republican caucus makes the Gingrich era GOP leaders look like statesmen.

A new campaign will test the strength ofTrump’s base. But even if his mythical connection to those voters might not be enough to win him the presidency, it could still carry him to his third straight nomination. The fact that most Republicans would not repudiate Trump over his call to end the Constitution indicates that he has the support of his supporters at home. The same can be said for House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who has found ways not to condemn Trump’s recent associations with extremists in his desperate bid to win the speaker’s gavel next month.

Still, any president is deeply vulnerable to unexpected outside events that could splinter his approval ratings and chances of reelection. Every day, the oldest president in US history will have to contend with the age issue. Republicans will seize on any slackening of the campaign trail pace, or even a cold, as proof he’s unfit for a second term. The chances of an adverse event going up for Biden are greater when he is in his 80s.

The opposite has happened. Potential foes of Biden will not run against them. Almost every power player in the Democratic Party has said they will back Biden, if he decides to run again.

The same cannot be said for Trump. He declared his candidacy for the presidency a month ago, but so far only one senator has endorsed his reelection bid. Republican potential challengers are not going to give up on the primary.

The weak poll numbers of Trump are a big reason for this. I’m not just talking about his polling against other Republicans. I’m talking about how Republican voters see him.

Other polling suggests that these findings may understate Trump’s weakness. There isn’t a single poll of a two-way matchup between Trump and DeSantis (that meets CNN’s standards for publication) that has Trump ahead. Marquette University Law School’s poll had Trump down 20 points to the Florida governor a few weeks ago.

This indicates that Trump’s biggest strength at this point among Republicans is name recognition – something other Republicans will get a lot more of as the primary season heats up.

What Next for the United States? The Russian War on Ukraine as a Tool for Counter-Democracy, Instability, and the Implications for 2024

These days, even off-cycle years in American politics can be quite significant in shaping the future of the country. There are 10 political questions that will be critical in determining what comes next in Washington, DC.

The Russian war against Ukraine has already had huge ramifications in the United States. Inflation has many roots, but the cost of losing Russia’s oil supplies has been significant. While policymakers at the Dept. of Defense keep a close eye on Russia to see if desperation will drive it to attack a NATO country, there are emerging partisan tensions within the US about how much support to give to Ukraine. And there may be more than Ukraine to consider. We are never sure what is around the corner in international policy. A major crisis can flare up at any time to fundamentally reshape our national conversation.

One senses a similar dynamic today. With the pandemic almost officially behind us, January 6 a fading memory and the economy beginning to return to normal, many Americans appear ready for a politics that focuses on new challenges rather than rehashing old battles over mask mandates and election integrity.

election denialism remains a strong force in the GOP despite the defeat of many election deniers in the recent elections. There are people in certain states ready to fight results that don’t go their way. The red states still insist on voting restrictions. The January 6 committee report exposed just how vulnerable our democracy remains. Even with the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act, there are many ways in which anti-democratic forces can exert influence in 2024. The results will be influenced by the ability of the democratic system to resist attacks.

Biden’s Second State of the Union Address: Implications for the United States Constitution, Trade Agreements, and the Future of the World

There are always new questions that await us. Any good list about what is to come must account for all the things that aren’t even being imagined right now. Few predictive pieces in December 2019, after all, would have included a global pandemic.

But we can know this for certain: 2023 will be a big one, a political rollercoaster which will clarify the terms that will help determine the next president of the United States.

In his second State of the Union Address, President Biden pleaded with Republicans to unify, but promised not to back off of his economic agenda, while giving no new ideas.

“Clearly, having the House Republican caucus behaving the way they are, and are signaling strongly they will continue to behave, is going to give the president an easy contrast,” she said. He is being given a chance to contrast what he is for with what he is trying to get done with the House Republicans.

How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to keep an eye on us. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes any political campaign raising money or participation in a rally or march to support it.

BidenTrump America Deserves Morebrown: A Conservative Perspective on the 1918 1918 Influence on Social Security, Medicare, and Social Security

Republicans have not said how they would achieve their goal of reducing spending by a large amount. And there have been several notable Republicans who have proposed ideas like making all laws expire after five years unless lawmakers renew them — an idea that Mr. Biden says means Social Security and Medicare would go away automatically if such a vote failed.

Patrick is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center which is a conservative think tank. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. His views are reflected in this piece. View more opinion on CNN.

Millions died in the 1918 flu outbreak and its impact was similar to our recent coronaviruses Pandemic. It disappeared from popular culture just as soon as it ended. Americans were ready to turn the page on war and pestilence and let loose in the roaring ’20s.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/opinions/biden-trump-america-deserves-more-brown/index.html

A Look at the Past, Present, Future of our Nation: Joseph Biden, President Joe Biden and the Democratic Challenge to the U.S. Senate

At its best, President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech offered that forward-looking vision, highlighting his administration’s commitment to rebuilding America’s supply chain and spurring innovation. But no amount of rhetoric could disguise the fact that our political system could be on a collision course to offer up the rematch no one is asking for.

The results of the fight against left-wing excesses can be seen at the state level by those Republicans who want to take the battle to “woke” institutions.

Other potential challengers, like former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, face an uncertain path to the nomination but also offer a generational shift and a different set of priorities. Many party operatives will admit that Trump’s campaign will come across as detached from the problems facing workingclass Americans if it looks backward at the indignities of the disease or his false claims.

An explicit age-based argument can backfire if younger candidate tries to push aside a more seasoned candidate. Just ask former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julin Castro, who had to learn from the mistake of attack lines that focus on an older candidate’s memory or hearing. Senior citizens are reliable voters, so politicians should be careful not to sound prejudice towards older Americans when campaigning against a senior opponent.

The creation of NATO, the first color TV broadcast and the founding of China and Israel are only a few of the events which the incumbent President and his predecessor were alive for.

There is a wisdom in age and valuable perspective in having seen the long sweep of history. Both the President and the former President should know that the desire for a change is not based on age, but on the demands of their jobs and needs for new voices and ideas.

Both Trump and Biden fulfilled their stated primary objectives as President –Trump, to draw attention to the plight of the “forgotten men and women of our country” and to raise questions about the logic of globalization that turned a blind eye to the rise of China, and Biden, to seek a return to something closer to normalcy after the four chaotic years that preceded him.

It suggests political rewards for the party willing to gamble on a younger nominee if they choose the other option. The Democrats focused on choosing the best candidate to beat Trump in the 2020 primary election. Maybe Biden is still the right man for the job. But a presidential debate stage featuring a younger, more energetic politician focused on issues of the moment would draw a stark contrast with one whose habits were formed during the Cold War.

Whether that’s a younger Democratic nominee more effectively tapping into discontent over the Dobbs decision’s impact on abortion rights, or a Republican candidate speaking, as a parent of young children, about the need to better protect kids online, a passing of the generational torch will allow for a much-needed shift of focus to fresh challenges.

What Do Far-Right Candidates Think about Biden and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Budget? Revisiting a Post-State-of-the-Union Scenario

Bill McGowan is the founder and CEO of Clarity Media Group a global communications coaching firm in New York. He is the author of a book calledPitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time. Silva is a strategic communications adviser. The viewpoints expressed in this commentary are not of the authors. View more opinion articles on CNN.

The State of the Union jousting between Biden and the Republican caucus perfectly sums up the contrasting styles between the President and his adversaries. The Republicans, with their outrage-driven heckling, are doubling down on their image as brass-knuckled street fighters. What they seemingly haven’t learned from 2020 is that Biden thrives when cast as the gentler, more amiable counterpuncher.

The disarming tactic was on full display during his State of the Union address, when he jokingly told Republicans who opposed the infrastructure bill he signed into law they should see the jobs they helped create in their districts.

The question heading into the State of the Union address was: Would Biden’s empathy and decency stand out as much without his chaotic and mean-spirited adversary there to accentuate the stark contrast?

In part, it was because of a new breed of House Republicans more willing to create chaos in the absence of President Donald Trump that the answer was yes.

Members of the GOP just can’t help themselves. Perhaps they thought that insulting Biden from the House floor, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia did in repeatedly shouting “liar,” would represent some kind of destabilizing surprise ambush.

The President swatted the attacks away and even managed to turn the tables on his critics. Of course, if those GOP rabblerousers had carefully watched videos of his 2020 presidential debates, they would have known that ruffling Biden’s feathers is pretty tough to do. In Washington DC, you don’t spend a lot of time looking thin.

By keeping the hostility factor high, the GOP is also paving the way for Biden to reuse in 2024 one of his stickiest and most effective campaign messages from 2020: that the election is nothing short of a battle for the “soul of the nation.” Thanks to the new breed of attention-seeking, far-right Republicans, Biden gets to go back to that well regardless of whether Trump is his opponent or not.

During the State of the Union, Biden made a point of bringing vigor to his delivery, perhaps in an effort to prove there’s still plenty of fuel left in that 80-year-old tank. Even though Biden is almost half his age, the campaign trail can be a long one.

Biden has made a career out of being underestimated. The political skill with which the State of the Union was delivered made one loud statement as the 2024 election season approaches: Underestimate me at your own peril.