Journos Are Rooting for a Biden Comeback, but the Polls Keep Disappointing Them

President Joe Biden kicked off his election-year campaigning with a pair of aggressive anti-Trump speeches. In marking the anniversary of the January 6th Capitol riot, the incumbent invoked his likely challenger's name more than 40 times. A few days later, Biden called Trump a "loser" in a speech before a Charleston, South Carolina congregation. If the expected 2020 rematch indeed plays out over the coming months, we are in store for an extraordinarily ugly political season, as each unpopular nominee fights to convince a relative handful of persuadable voters that the alternative option is worse. Biden will go through the motions of touting his record, but his team knows that isn't selling.

They can cherry-pick statistics, elide important context, ignore glaring failures, and inflate "achievements" til kingdom come. Voter sentiment remains stubbornly entrenched, and justifiably unimpressed. New year, familiar numbers:

CBS News Poll: Biden Job Approval

Approve: 41%
Disapprove: 59%
—
• No college: 29-71 (-42)
• Immigration: 30-70 (-40)
• Independents: 33-67 (-34)
• The Economy: 36-64 (-28)
• 4 year degree: 47-53 (-6)
• Ages 18-29: 49-51 (-2)
—
YouGov (B+) | n=2,157 | Jan. 3-5 | ± 2.8% pic.twitter.com/mNv0YpcVa8
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 7, 2024

He's 18 points underwater overall, and still getting crushed on the economy and inflation, despite some untick in financial optimism within the data set. By a bruising two-to-one margin, independent voters disapprove of his performance. A slim majority of the youngest voters also disapprove. He's at a weak (43/57) among Hispanics. He's also only wheezing along at (59/41) among black voters, one of his party's most loyal constituencies (hence racial pander-fests like the one referenced above). The latest survey from the Financial Times looks even worse for Biden, with his general approval in the toilet -- and, critically, a majority of voters feeling worse off financially under his presidency, versus fewer than one-in-five who say their status has improved:

📊 FT National Poll: Biden Job Approval

Approve: 39%
Disapprove: 58%
—
Since Biden became President, would you say that you are financially...

Better off: 17%
Worse off: 53%
—
• @GSG (D) | North Star Research (R)
• D39/R35/I25 | 12/28-1/2 | n=1,000https://t.co/CB8pSBMYbK pic.twitter.com/1waw826GLi
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 8, 2024

Trump is facing criminal indictments. Biden is facing political and economic ones. CBS also polled Biden's border crisis, resulting in some muddled and contradictory responses -- but what's clear is that Americans aren't happy with what's happening. Three-in-four voters say the border mess is either "very serious" or a "crisis," with a large plurality embracing the (accurate) latter term. Roughly two-thirds of respondents say it's too easy for migrants to enter the country, and a substantial majority believe those who arrive should have to wait outside of the US for their eventual hearings, or shouldn't receive hearings at all. I'll note that these were the verdicts rendered even with CBS referring to the illegal immigrants as "asylum seekers" (a highly sympathetic framing that doesn't apply to the vast majority of them), or simply "immigrants." As for Trump-Biden head-to-heads, a new batch of battleground state polling appears quite similar to what we've been looking at over the last several months:

🇺🇲 2024 GE: @RedfieldWilton

ARIZONA
Trump: 41% (+6)
Biden: 35%
RFK Jr: 10%
--
GEORGIA
Trump: 42% (+8)
Biden: 34%
RFK Jr: 8%
--
FLORIDA
Trump: 45% (+11)
Biden: 34%
RFK Jr: 9%
--
PENNSYLVANIA
Trump: 40% (+1)
Biden: 39%
RFK Jr: 6%
--
MICHIGAN
Trump: 39% (+2)
Biden: 37%
RFK Jr: 9%… pic.twitter.com/P9Wt6gxHDF
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 8, 2024

With RFK on the ballot, Trump leads in each of the six states polled. His advantages range from razor thin (1-2 points in Pennsylvania and Michigan) to modest (up 4-6 in North Carolina and Arizona) to comfortable (8 points in Georgia, 11 in Florida). And here's a Democrat-aligned pollster finding Trump leading Biden in two contested states: