The Challenges of Biden, the President, and the Media: Democrat Wins over Biden Skeptics during the Arizona Senate Battle

Democrats are attracting a large percentage of voters who do not like Biden, according to polls. Some recent surveys have shown Democrats leading slightly among voters who disapprove of Biden, an indication of a reversal from 2010 when the president’s party lost a lot of voters who disapproved.

Democrats win over Biden skeptics: The strength of individual candidates likely helped Democratic candidates win over some voters who were disenchanted with the Democratic president. In New Hampshire, a Democratic incumbent won every single voter who approved of Vice President Biden and only onefifth of those who disapproved.

Bryan Bennett of Navigator says that this election is weird because of that. “People are having to make this trade-off between the immediate economic concerns [where]…they might blame the incumbent party in power. They know that the same party will protect a fundamental human right on abortion.

The push and pull between the competing priorities has been very clear in the first flurry of general election Senate debates in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. During last week’s televised Arizona encounter, for instance, Republican challenger Blake Masters came out of the gate very strong and kept Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly on the defensive by relentlessly linking him to Biden while the conversation initially focused on inflation and border security. But as the discussion shifted toward abortion and election integrity, Kelly clearly regained the momentum, as Masters struggled to explain his support during the GOP primary for a near total ban on abortion and his embrace of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in 2020.

There are not many recent precedents for Senate candidates from the president’s party winning races in states where his approval rating has fallen that low. In 2018, Republicans lost all 10 Senate races in states where Trump’s approval rating stood at 48% or less, according to exit polls. The 2010 Republican sweep saw Democrats lose 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where Barack Obama’s approval rating was lower than 45% and only two of those races were carried by Joe Manchin in West Virginia. In 2006, Republicans lost 19 of the 20 Senate races in states where exit polls put George W. Bush’s approval at 45% or less (then-Senator Olympia Snowe in Maine was the sole exception.)

The precedent proves the opportunity that doubts about individual GOP Senate nominees have for Democrats. The reason Manchin and Tester were able to survive because a majority of voters in exit polls held negative personal views of the Republican opponent was that they had a strong approval rating for Trump. Exit polls did not measure personal favorability of the candidates in Ohio and Arizona that year, but pre-election polls also showed the GOP nominees in those states facing broadly negative assessments as well.

The latest snapshot of the divergence was offered by the national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll. Republicans were asked what issue they consider most important in the next decade. Democrats were in agreement on preserving democracy, abortion and health care. Independents split exactly in half between the priorities of the two parties: inflation and immigration on the one side, and democracy, abortion and health care on the other. Voters with at least a four-year college degree leaned relatively more toward democracy and abortion; those without degrees (including Latinos) tended to stress inflation. The survey did not include crime as an option, but it provoked the most worry from Republicans and non-college educated voters.

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. Since June, as CNN recently reported, Democratic candidates have spent over $130 million on abortion-themed ads, vastly more than Republicans.

Demographic Conundrum: How Economic Incentives Are Putting a Biden-Biden Economic Focus on the Future of Domestic Production

The argument may be that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the three Biden legislative accomplishments will result in a boom in US employment.

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. His main concern is that too many Democrats are sublimating any economic message while focusing preponderantly on abortion.

The case of helping struggling families with cost-saving provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and the coming manufacturing boom are some of the arguments Democrats are making. But the campaign’s final weeks will measure whether that current reaches a level that breaches all of the party’s defenses.

Compared with January, there’s been a steeper increase in support for nominating someone other than Biden among Democratic-aligned voters of color (from 43% to 53%) than among White voters (from 57% to 63%) and among independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (from 60% to 77%) than self-identified Democrats (from 48% to 53%). 70% of Democratic voters under the age of 35 wouldn’t mind seeing someone else at the top of the ticket, compared with 42% of those over the age of 65.

College was a particularly strong dividing line. Among those with a bachelor’s degree, Democrats held a 13-point advantage. Republicans held a 15-point advantage among those without 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.

The survey showed that the Republicans had completely wiped out the Democrats’ 11-point lead for women in congressional races in November.

Donald Trump was more on voters’ minds as president than the incumbent. Almost two-thirds of the voters said they intended to vote against him, compared to only one-third who said they were against Biden.

National exit polling shows that a majority of mid-term voters don’t want Biden to run for president in 2024, compared to a small number who do. The current numbers show that, unsurprisingly, 90% of self-identified Republicans who voted in the midterm don’t want to see Biden run again, but 38% of self-identified Democrats also don’t want to see him run again.

Today, the mood of the nation is decidedly sour. A strong majority of likely voters, 64 percent, sees the country as moving in the wrong direction, compared with just 24 percent who see the nation as on the right track. The share of likely Democratic voters who think the nation is headed in the right direction has fallen by six percentage points since September and is above the low point of the summer.

David Neiheisel is an insurance salesman in Indianapolis and a Republican. Everything has gone up unbelievably, and it is going to collapse.

The Times/Siena Survey of Arizona: The Importance of Inflation for a Democratic Presidential Candidate and the Final State of Arizona

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 equal to or less than 4%. There are methodologies and cross-tabs here.

Mike Noble, an independent pollster in Phoenix, sees more opportunity for Democrats to separate from the president, at least in Arizona. In a poll released Monday by his firm, OH Predictive Insights, Noble said Kelly narrowly led Masters, even though a clear majority of Arizona likely voters expressed a negative view on Biden. One reason for Kelly’s lead, Noble said, is that the poll found almost one-fifth of voters who were unfavorable toward Biden also expressed negative views about Masters. Those ambivalent voters, Noble said, were backing Kelly over Masters by more than eight-to-one.

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.

“The big problem for Democrats is things have not gotten better in people’s eyes, regardless of what they have done in passing legislation and what good it might do in the future,” says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “If inflation had come down from where it has been, they would be in better shape. But you can’t convince people that things are going better when their own experience tells them that it’s not.”

In the last twenty to thirty years, we have seen a connection between opinions about national issues and how people vote in congressional elections. It used to be easier for incumbents to run far behind a president from their own party’s approval rating, because of their reputation in their state or district and other benefits. The value has changed over time.

The Democrats had to win states where the majority of the population preferred the other party. They were running against a majority that approved of a Republican president, meaning that Democrats are facing a majority that disapproves of a Democratic president.

A CNN mid-October poll shows that despite attracting double-digit support from voters who do not approve of Biden they are 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. The reason, he argues, is that in the end, disenchantment with current conditions and Biden’s performance will turbocharge more turnout from Republicans, and depress turnout more from Democrats, than most models now anticipate. He says the electorate is going to crush everything.

Such exceptions have become rare in modern US politics. Democrats will likely need a lot more of them if Biden is to hold the Senate.

Voters didn’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2022, even though they sent a lot of mixed signals.

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

Biden will turn 80 in nine days’ time and will be 82 years old shortly after the 2024 election. At the end of a second term, he would be 86 years old. By comparison, Ronald Reagan was 77 years old when he left office in 1989.

CNN Exit Polls: Finding Your Favorable 2020 Presidential Candidate? The Case of the Republican-Aligned Campaign, Including an Analysis of the National Election Pool

It’s not certain which party will control the Senate or the House in the next year, with races too early to call. But it’s clear that the “red wave” wished for by Republicans did not materialize in 2022.

Abortion rights: The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade brought abortion to center stage, with about 27% of voters calling it their top issue. More than half of voters think the decision is bad, with a third of them expressing anger. Democrats had an 11-point advantage over the GOP when it came to which party voters preferred to deal with abortion issues.

In Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race, the projected Democratic winner, Josh Shapiro, picked up roughly one-quarter of commonwealth voters who disapproved of Biden. In a number of races, Democratic candidates won outright among voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden.

CNN Exit Polls are a combination of in-person interviews with Election Day voters and in-person interviews, telephone and online polls measuring the views of early and absentee by-mail voters. They were conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. Here you can read more about it.

There’s little appetite for a 2020 rematch in the coming presidential election, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, as majorities of registered voters within each party say they’d rather see someone new nominated in 2024.

Despite tepid support for Trump to win the nomination, the survey finds the former president would likely enjoy majority backing among Republican-aligned voters in the general election if he did emerge as the party’s candidate. About two-thirds of those who want someone else to be the nominee also say they would definitely (36%) or probably (30%) vote for Trump if he did become the party’s nominee. In total, roughly 8 in 10 Republican-aligned voters either want Trump to be the nominee (38%) or say they would likely vote for him if he won the party’s nod(41%).

Half of Republican-aligned voters think that Trump has done a good thing for the Republicans, but less than a year ago most felt that way. A third (33%) say he’s had a bad effect, and 15% that he hasn’t made much difference.

The CNN Poll of the Democrat Party in the U.S. Rep. I.D. How Do You Think About a Candidate?

Among Democrats who say they’d like someone else as the party’s nominee, nearly three-quarters (72%) say they have no one specific in mind. Among those who do name another candidate, 5% mention Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 4% California Gov. Gavin Newsom, 4% Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 3% Vice President Kamala Harris and 2% Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The CNN Poll was conducted among a random national sample of 1,108 adults, drawn from a probability based panel. A live interviewer was used for online and telephone surveys. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 points; it is larger for subgroups.