BIDEN POLL NUMBERS CONTINUE TO MAKE TRIUMP SERIOUS ABOUT RUNNING IN 2024

 

               ...The President's poll numbers are as low as they have ever been.

 

Biden’s poll numbers continue to drop based on his lack of actions as expected

 

Our former president is very happy that President Biden’s poll numbers have continued to fall, especially for those Blacks in the south.

That is showing up especially for W. Mondale Robinson that is the founder of the Black Male Voter Project.  Robinson has been spending a large chunk of his time in clubs and bars in Georgia for trying to convince disenchanted Black men that their voting for Joe Biden in the 2020 election made a big difference.

Robinson’s support for the president has begun to fade, and the polls are telling us why.

Here are some of why the polls have been falling and why Robinson is finding his job to be much harder:

• When the Democrats and Biden were open to significantly weaken the police reform bill, just to get Republican support.

• When Biden did not push for filibuster reform for enacting a $15.00 minimum wage.

• When the president did not try to halt a raft of voting restrictions passed by Georgia’s GOP led legislature.

• The president cannot go to Georgia, or any other southern state to say: ”This is what we delivered for you in 2021,” because little has been done for them since he took office.  

Robinson, whose group believes it reached 1.2 million Black men in Georgia, had this to say: “Black men are pissed off about the nothingness that has happened . . . Does it make the work harder? It makes the work damn near impossible.”

After an initial burst of support, Biden has seen his approval ratings fall significantly in recent months. A Washington Post average of polls since the start of September shows 44% of Americans approve of Biden’s job approval, while 49% disapprove.

And the polls suggest support for Biden has sunk notably among key Democratic constituencies.  That includes: Blacks, Latinos, women and young people.  Pew Research Center polls found Biden’s approval rating among Black Americans fell from 85% in July to 67% in September, while also falling 16 points among Hispanics and 14 points among Asians.

Interviews with nearly 20 advocates, activists and politicians in the crucial state of Georgia, which Biden won narrowly, in large part, the win was due to support from Black voters.  This is after decades of Republican dominance.  This  gives us a sense of the sentiments behind those poll numbers. At the center are Black and other minority voters who helped fuel Biden’s victory.  They now see what they consider unfulfilled promises and dwindling hope for meaningful change.

In some sense, the “benefit of the doubt” portion of Biden’s presidency is over. While the president gained initial goodwill among many, just because he wasn’t Trump.  This is especially true when it came to the Coronavirus.  Now those who supported him are demanding results, and his lack of a devoted base is starting to show.

“If the midterms are about enthusiasm and turnout, who do you think is excited to vote on November 2 at this moment?” said Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, which has registered more than a half-million voters. “Because it ain’t Democrats. It ain’t Black folks. It ain’t young people.”

It remains to be seen whether Biden’s falling support is a sign of being an enduring issue, or is it a short-term reflection of the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan.  In addition, to a stalled domestic agenda and a surge in coronavirus infections due to the Delta variant.

But the discontent is particularly visible in Georgia, where Democrats had hoped demographic changes and mobilization efforts would offer a blueprint for expanding their electoral map.

Some Biden voters said the president will struggle to keep hard-to-engage voters in the fold if he fails to deliver on the issues that motivated them in the first place.  That is notably police reform and voting rights. And they dismissed Democrats’ efforts to blame the lack of progress solely on the partisan divide.

“There are some things that they are willing to hold the line for and to be more adamant about,” said Christine White.  White is the executive director of the Georgia Alliance for Progress, which funds nonprofits across the state. “And I think that there are times where we cower and we believe the rhetoric about partisanship.”

Biden and his aides have warned against putting too much stock in poll numbers.  In taking on tough issues, they say, the president knew the politics would sometimes be tough. But if Biden can defeat the pandemic, pass his infrastructure and social agenda, and continue making progress on racial justice. Biden’s aides say his popularity will take care of itself.  But will it?

“The power is literally in your hands,” Biden told Georgians. “You can break the gridlock that has gripped Washington and this nation. With their votes in the Senate, we’ll be able to make the progress we need to make on jobs, on health care, on justice, on the environment, on so many important things.”

But to many of those voters, those changes are now, nowhere to be found.

Congress has been unable to pass a voting rights law. And the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was co-authored by Vice President Harris, back when she was a senator. But the act died after a bipartisan group was unable to find a compromise.  This is despite repeated urging from Biden to get it done before the anniversary of Floyd’s death.

At the same time, many have been disturbed by the TV images of Haitian immigrants, seeking asylum during a tumultuous time in that country.  We have all seen the Haitians being herded and struck by White immigration agents on horseback. The images, Christine White said, “send a signal to Black people that our government has not done enough to eradicate the racist structural behaviors of law enforcement.”  The message that comes across very easily through the imagery is that America doesn’t care about Black people, period.”

“The Black agenda is bigger than voting rights and bigger than the George Floyd Police and Justice Act,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said recently.

Aides also say the president has not given up on pushing voting rights and police reform bills through Congress. “Both are hugely important,” Psaki said. “The president has committed to getting them both done. He wants to sign them into law.” Pressed on why Biden has not made that happen, she noted that Congress is “a separate body. You need 50 votes to change the filibuster. You also need the majority of votes to pass legislation into law.”

The activists in Georgia say Biden and the Democrats have allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered. Many mentioned Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), moderate Democrats who critics said have played an inappropriate role in stopping Biden’s agenda.

Adelina Nicholls, who leads the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, said her group knocked on “every Latino door in Georgia” before the 2020 election.  But now she is dismayed by the lack of help she says Biden has given to immigrants.

“The concern that we have is that the Democratic Party, they keep repeating the same mistakes,” Nicholls said. “We worked for something here. Let’s try something new, let’s be different. What good is a politician that doesn’t work for the benefit of the community that elected him?”

Robinson, the leader of the Black Male Voter Project, said that his days of reaching out to reluctant voters are not over and that he hopes Black men in Georgia will reliably show up to vote in future elections. But with little movement on the issues that matter most to the group, he thinks the conversations will be a lot tougher next election cycle.

“They can’t call me and ask me to serve my brothers up on a platter for their benefit,” he said. “They can’t have my data, they can’t have access to what I know about Black men from the work that we do, unless I see something serious for Black men. And that requires a conversation with [Black men] long before Labor Day on an election year.”

The reality is that if Biden poll numbers continue to be under 50%, the Republicans stand a good chance to take the House and even the Senate in the 2022 midterms.

Copyright G. Ater 2021