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Most Democrats Would Prefer Biden Not Run Again in 2024, Poll Finds

A large majority of Democrats would prefer that their party nominate someone other than incumbent President Joe Biden as its candidate in the 2024 presidential election, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College found. 

The poll asked respondents who plan to vote in the Democratic primary elections whether they want the party to renominate Biden. Only 26% said that they would like to see Biden on the ballot again, compared to 64% who said they would prefer someone else. 

The poll’s findings paint a grim picture for the incumbent president, whose standing with the public is being battered by high inflation and the inability of his party to push its agenda through the closely divided Senate. 

In one of the survey’s only bright spots for the president, it found that among all voters, in a rematch of the 2020 election, with Biden facing former President Donald Trump in 2024, Biden would win 44% of the vote to Trump’s 41%. 

Age a major factor 

Democratic respondents who said they would prefer that the party nominate a different presidential candidate in 2024 were asked to explain why. One-third said that Biden’s age is a factor. At 79, Biden is already the oldest person ever to serve as president, and he will be nearly 82 at the time of the 2024 election. 

It was the oldest cohort of survey respondents, those over 65, who were most concerned about Biden’s age, with 60% citing it as their primary reason for wanting a different candidate. The youngest cohort, those aged 18 to 35, were the least likely to cite Biden’s age, with only 14% choosing it as their primary concern. 

Nearly as many respondents, 32%, cited Biden’s job performance as their reason. Twelve percent said they would simply prefer someone else, and 10% said that they don’t view the president as being “progressive enough.” 

Country seen moving in ‘wrong direction’ 

The new poll found that 77% of Americans believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus only 13% who believe it is headed in the right direction. 

The stark assessment of the country’s trajectory held across all the different subgroups tracked by the poll. A majority of Republicans (89%), Independents (81%), and Democrats (63%) chose the “wrong direction.” When pollsters divided respondents by age, education, and ethnicity, majorities of each agreed with the negative assessment. 

The subgroup with the least negative assessment of the country’s path was Black Americans, 54% of whom said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus 30% who believe it is on the right track. White Americans were most dissatisfied with 82% viewing the country as moving in the wrong direction while just 9% see it as on the right track. 

Low approval of Biden 

Asked whether they approve or disapprove of how Biden is handling his job, only 33% of respondents said they approved. Among Democrats, the number was 70%, a low figure for a party’s incumbent president. Among Republicans, the figure was just 8%. 

The poll tried to separate respondent’s personal feelings about Biden from their sense of how he is performing as president. When asked if they have a favorable or unfavorable impression of Biden personally, the numbers were not much better. 

Only 39% said they had a favorable impression of the president, with 58% reporting an unfavorable impression. The partisan divide was stark, with 85% of Democrats reporting a favorable impression, compared to 30% of Independents and just 7% of Republicans. 

White House reacts 

Asked about the poll during a news briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that it also found that 92% of Democrats would vote for Biden in a rematch against Trump. More broadly, though, she said that the administration is not focused on polls. 

“There’s going to be many polls; they’re going to go up and they’re going to go down,” she said. “This is not the thing that we are solely focused on.” 

Instead, she said, the White House is focused on things like the bipartisan gun control legislation that Biden signed into law Monday, fighting inflation, and creating jobs

Bad sign for midterms 

Kyle Kondik, the executive editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA that Biden’s approval numbers in the new poll are significantly lower than those in most other public polling, but said they still reflect a troubling trend for the president and his party. 

“The numbers have been slowly slipping, really for a long time going back to last year,” he said. “There’s just been this erosion and the erosion continues. Whatever the bottom is, it doesn’t seem like he’s hit it yet.” 

It’s bad news for the Democrats, given that November’s midterm elections, which will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years, are only four months away. 

“Typically bad approval is a contributor to a bad midterm outcome for a president’s party,” Kondik said. 

Rumors of a primary challenge 

The news that many Democrats would prefer that Biden not run for a second term will fuel speculation that another Democratic leader might challenge the president in a primary election. 

While primary challenges to a sitting president are uncommon, they are not unheard of. In 1992, Republican President George H.W. Bush faced a primary challenge from conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan. In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter was challenged by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy. In 1976, Republican President Gerald Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. 

In all three cases, the sitting president defeated his primary challenger. All three, however, went on to lose in the general election. 

While Biden insists that he will run again, and there are no prominent Democratic politicians who have publicly broken from Biden, experts said that if Biden’s numbers continue to decline, the likelihood that one or more Democrats will challenge him increases. If that happens, Biden will likely feel the need to take dramatic action to demonstrate that he remains in control of the party. 

“The problem of an unpopular incumbent is that his problems and limitations are concrete, but all his potential replacements’ advantages and disadvantages are hypothetical,” Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA in an email exchange. 

“As (California Governor) Gavin Newsom, (Illinois Governor) J.B. Pritzker and others are emboldened to position themselves for 2024, Biden will feel increased pressure to be more radical and confrontational,” he said. 

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden touted himself as a dealmaker who would find common ground between Democrats and Republicans to pass critical legislation. As president, he has signed into law bipartisan bills to overhaul American infrastructure and curb gun violence, both of which are broadly popular. But many Democratic priorities remain undone, from protecting voting rights to an ambitious plan to combat climate change, boost educational opportunities, and help working families.
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New US Capitol Riot Hearing to Focus on Extremist Group Links to Trump, Associates

The congressional panel investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol last year is set to hear testimony Tuesday linking far-right extremist groups to the mayhem as they attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election over then-incumbent Donald Trump.

The House of Representatives committee has yet to say who will testify at its latest high-profile hearing, but one is expected to be Jason Van Tatenhove, a self-described “propagandist” for the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia. Its members were among about 2,000 Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.

Other testimony is expected to focus on the role played by the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. Five of its leaders have been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the insurrection at the Capitol and are awaiting trial later this year. The same charge has been filed against 11 Oath Keepers, three of whom have already pleaded guilty.

Trump has derided the committee’s investigation, calling its nine members — seven Democrats and two vocal anti-Trump Republicans — “political thugs and hacks.”

The question facing the investigative panel is showing what link, if any, the extremist groups had specifically to Trump, while more broadly detailing contacts they had with his political associates as he sought to retain power by upending the official state-by-state vote counts showing that Biden had won.

Central to the hearing is a tweet Trump sent to millions of his followers on Dec. 19, 2020, saying, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Representative Jamie Raskin, the committee member who will be handling much of the questioning Tuesday, told CBS News, “Donald Trump was, of course, the central figure who set everything into motion. He was the person … who identified January 6th as the date for the big protest, and he announced that in his tweet in the middle of the night of December 19th after a crazy meeting (with political aides), one that has been described as the craziest meeting in the entire Trump presidency.”

“And then just an hour or two later,” Raskin said, “Donald Trump sent out the tweet that would be heard around the world, the first time in American history when a president had called a protest against his own government, in fact, to try to stop the counting of Electoral College votes in a presidential election he had lost. Absolutely unprecedented. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”

“So, people are going to hear the story of that tweet and then the explosive effect it had in Trump world, and specifically among the domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point,” Raskin said.

Raskin told online news organization Politico, “Our investigation shows that there was a tremendous convergence of interests between the domestic violent extremist groups and the broader (Make America Great Again) movement” supporting Trump. “This hearing will be the moment when one sees both the convergence of efforts at a political coup with the insurrectionary mob violence. We see how these two streams of activity become one.”

Representative Zoe Lofgren, another committee member, told CNN on Sunday that Trump ally Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, for a short time in 2017 Trump’s national security adviser, were two possible links to the extremist groups.

The protesters who stormed into the Capitol ransacked congressional offices, scuffled with police and for hours blocked the certification of Biden’s victory. Eventually the Capitol building, a symbol of American democracy, was cleared of protesters, and Biden won the Electoral College vote by a 306-232 count.

In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes is dependent on its population, with the biggest states holding the most sway.

More than 800 of the protesters have subsequently been charged with an array of offenses from trespassing to assaulting police officers, and more than 300 have pleaded guilty or been convicted in trials. Sentences have ranged from a few weeks in prison to more than four years. The sedition charges filed against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers carry substantially longer terms.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the committee could also show videotaped segments of closed-door testimony that Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, gave the committee last Friday. He was often in close proximity to Trump in the days before the riot and as Trump watched it unfold on a White House television, refusing entreaties for more than three hours from aides and his older daughter, Ivanka, to call off the rioters.

At its most recent hearing, the panel heard testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, the top assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, that Trump in the waning weeks of his presidency became increasingly angry and volatile regarding his re-election loss.

She testified that Trump knew some of his supporters at a rally near the White House were armed but still urged them to walk to the Capitol. Hutchinson said Trump berated his Secret Service detail for not driving him to the Capitol, and in December 2020, threw his lunch against a wall of a White House dining room when he learned that then-Attorney General William Barr had concluded there was no election fraud.

Witnesses at earlier hearings told the investigative panel that there were minimal voting irregularities, not enough to overturn Biden’s Electoral College victory.

In addition, Trump was told it would be illegal for then-Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block Biden’s victory as Pence presided over the congressional Electoral College vote count. Still, Trump privately and publicly demanded the vice president block certification of Biden’s victory. To this day, Trump contends he was cheated out of another White House term.

Over the weekend, Trump said in a letter that he would allow one of his former aides, Steve Bannon, to testify before the investigative panel. He also said the committee had “allowed no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, and no real Republican members or witnesses to be present or interviewed. It is a partisan Kangaroo Court.”

Republicans blocked a full-scale probe that would have been patterned after the investigation of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
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Ex-Trump Aide Bannon Offers to Testify in US Probe of January 6 Riot

Donald Trump’s former close adviser Steve Bannon has told the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that he is ready to testify, a change of heart days before he is due to be tried for contempt of Congress.

In a letter to the committee seen by Reuters, Bannon’s lawyer, Robert Costello, wrote to say the former president would waive the claim of executive privilege that Bannon had cited in refusing to appear before the committee. 

Bannon, a prominent figure in right-wing media circles who served as Trump’s chief strategist in 2017, is scheduled to go on trial July 18 on two criminal contempt charges for refusing to testify or provide documents.  

The letter from the lawyer said Bannon preferred to testify publicly, but Representative Zoe Lofgren, a committee Democrat, told CNN that ordinarily the committee takes a deposition behind closed doors.

“This goes on for hour after hour after hour. We want to get all our questions answered. And you can’t do that in a live format,” Lofgren said. “There are many questions that we have for him.”

Throughout the House of Representatives committee hearings, videotaped snippets of closed-door testimony by witnesses under oath have been shown to the public.

Trump has been chafing that none of his supporters have testified in his defense at the committee hearings, which, separate from the trial, are focused on the attack by Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification in Congress of Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the November 2020 election.

In a letter from Trump to Bannon seen by Reuters, Trump said he was waiving executive privilege because he “watched how unfairly you and others have been treated.”

The House panel is due to hold public hearings on Tuesday and Thursday this week.
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US House January 6 Panel to Hold Next Scheduled Hearing This Week

The select House of Representatives Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of then-President Trump is set to hold its next scheduled hearing Tuesday. Committee members say the hearing will focus on white nationalist groups’ participation in the attack. As VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, the seventh hearing follows a closed-door session last week with a former top White House lawyer.
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Blinken’s Talks in Bangkok to Focus on Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Bangkok, where Myanmar is expected to feature prominently in meetings Sunday with Thailand’s leaders.

The main topic of their discussions will likely be the crisis in Myanmar, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, adding the U.S. would continue to “condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the Burmese military regime’s brutal actions since the coup d’état, the killing of nearly 2,000 people and displacing more than 700,000 others.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Blinken is to meet with Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai. Expanding health and climate cooperation are also on the agenda, as is next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting, which the U.S. will host, according to the State Department.

The State Department announced Sunday that Blinken will travel to Tokyo on Monday to offer condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and to meet with senior Japanese officials.

Blinken arrived in Thailand a few days after his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was on his own tour of Southeast Asia. Over the weekend, Wang visited Myanmar, his first visit to the country since the military seized power last year.

Blinken and Wang met Saturday at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, and spoke for several hours.

The top U.S. diplomat told his Chinese counterpart during those meetings that China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is complicating U.S.-Chinese relations at a time when they are already beset by rifts and enmity over numerous other issues.

Wang blamed the U.S. for the downturn in relations and said American policy has been derailed by what he called a misperception of China as a threat.

“Many people believe that the United States is suffering from a China-phobia,” the Chinese foreign minister said, according to a Chinese statement. “If such threat-expansion is allowed to grow, U.S. policy toward China will be a dead end with no way out.”

Blinken said he conveyed “the deep concerns of the United States regarding Beijing’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity toward Taiwan.”

Blinken also noted he addressed U.S. concerns over Beijing’s use of the strategic South China Sea, the repression of freedom in Hong Kong, forced labor, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang.

Additionally, the U.S. secretary of state said that he and Wang discussed ways in which there could be more cooperation between the two countries in areas such as climate crisis, food security, global health and counternarcotics.

For his part, Wang said China and the United States need to work together to ensure that their relationship will continue to move forward along the right track.

Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was their first in-person since the chief U.S. diplomat unveiled the Biden administration’s strategy to outcompete the rival superpower. In his remarks at the time, Blinken said the U.S. was not seeking to decouple from China and the relationship between the world’s two largest economies was not a zero-sum game.

On Friday, the G-20 talks were dominated by discussion of the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies.

Indonesia, as the meeting’s host country, called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices.

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. Charter to urge multilateralism and trust.

Foreign ministers shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table but did not speak directly.
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