Former President Barack Obama warned Joe Biden that Donald Trump might not be as easy to beat as he thinks during a meeting the two had in the White House residence in late June and promised he would do all he could to re-elect him.
Obama remains the Democrats’ biggest star and will no doubt be on the campaign trail pushing for his former vice president.
“Well, there must have been an epic internal coverup operation because that supposed dynamic would be news to everyone who actually works for either person,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “No one has been a stronger supporter of the Biden-Harris Administration and its agenda than President Obama, his team, and veterans of the Obama-Biden Administration.”
Is Trump Unstoppable?
Obama noted to Biden that Trump retains a lock on the Republican electorate.
No matter how many indictments get thrown at him he remains like Gulliver, and his opponents have become like Lilliputians who do not seem able to undermine his base of support.
In early March, Trump had 43% support from the Republican electorate.
Since his first indictment, that has grown to 53% support.
By contrast, half of Democrats want someone other than Biden in 2024.
The president has a serious enthusiasm gap. Trump is unpopular but so is he. Biden won in 2020 because Trump came to be seen as boorish and offensive by millions of Americans, particularly in suburban counties where college-educated whites came out in droves against Trump.
Biden Faces Uphill Battle in 2024
In case of a rematch, Trump has shown to be less unpopular in polls than Biden.
In May, a poll found that 66% of Americans thought that a Biden victory would be a disaster or a setback for the country compared with 56% who said the same thing about Trump.
Only Jimmy Carter scored worse than Joe Biden at a comparable period in his term.
“At this point in his term — about 910 days in — Joe Biden is the second-most-unpopular president in modern U.S. history. As of July 18, Biden’s average job-approval rating, according to the poll aggregators at FiveThirtyEight, is a paltry 39.1%; his average disapproval rating is 55.4%. That means his “net approval rating” is -16.3%, which is well “underwater,” as pollsters like to say,” Yahoo! News columnist Andrew Romano wrote last month. “Negative 16.3% is also really bad historically speaking. In fact, the only president with weaker numbers than Biden was Jimmy Carter, who hit -28.6% on day 910. At the time, just 29% of Americans approved of Carter’s performance on average, while 57.6% disapproved.”
Romano contends that Biden has time to get his act together and convince voters why he is not too old to be elected to a second term.
Voters too Polarized to Support
“Today, our presidential elections are decided by half a dozen swing states. Everything else is locked in and predetermined. And not only that, we’re increasingly living among the like-minded … Most people in America live in an area that was won handily by one presidential candidate in the last election,” CNN commentator Michael Smerconish said explaining why he thinks that no president will have the support of a majority of Americans after the 2024 election.
Smerconish notes that voters are becoming more polarized and inflexible. The days of a Richard Nixon or a Ronald Reagan winning 49 of the 50 states are over. For Biden to win he will need to get every voter in Democrat-leaning areas out to vote. His unpopularity could lead to Donald Trump returning to power.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
