One-fifth of Joe Biden's voters regret voting for the president, according to a Zogby Analytics poll conducted in early August. Paul Bedard highlighted the poll in his Washington Secrets column for The Washington Examiner. Worse for Biden is that "many more voters might be expressing regret if Biden and company do not score a victory soon," according to pollster Jonathan Zogby. Seventy-six percent did not regret their vote, and 4 percent were unsure.
Twenty-one percent of Democrats regretted their votes for Biden, as did 29 percent of Republican voters who voted for the president, and 14 percent of Independents. While that 14 percent of Independents may have helped Biden overall in this poll, other polls show Biden has lost popularity with Independents.
Is that 20 percent a lot? It's actually quite significant. As Zogby explains it:
Why does this matter? If you take into consideration the size of the electorate, and how the last two Presidential elections (2016 and 2020) were decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, this could really hurt President Biden's chances in 2024. But even though Joe Biden has suffered humiliating defeats in recent weeks, he still has time to recover. One still gets the sense his ship is sinking fast, and he might not have any lifeboats aboard to save him. Biden's low approval numbers, the botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, and inflation eating away the purchasing power of Americans are the president's biggest problems now.
Groups who are more favorable to Democrats especially regretted their vote:
As for the poll, when we drill down and look at the demographics of the surveyed voters, some very important groups, who normally lean left and Democrat, were even more regretful about voting for the president in 2020. For example, younger voters aged 18-29 (27% yes/67% no/6% not sure) and middle aged voters aged 30-49 (30% yes/67% no/4% not sure) were much more likely to regret voting for Biden than older voters aged 50-64 (10% yes/87% no/3% not sure) and 65+ (6% yes/91% no/3% not sure)...
Poor policies from the Democrats have affected the poll as well, for instance inflation:
Some of the consumer subgroups we track also expressed regret voting for Biden, such as, weekly Walmart shoppers (27% yes/69% no/4% not sure), weekly Amazon shoppers (29% yes/68% no/3% not sure) and likely voters who had invested money in cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin (44% yes/53% no/3% not sure). One must assume that inflation and the potential of the federal government to reign in cryptocurrencies were driving these sentiments. The opposite held true for consumers who did not shop at Walmart (5% yes/94% no/1% not sure) and Amazon (11% yes/86% no/3% not sure) and voters who had not invested in cryptocurrency (11% yes/86% no/4% not sure).
And it gets worse for Biden, too. The poll was shared with Bedard on Friday, but was conducted August 5-13. Respondents were asked if they regretted voting for Biden before he and his administration badly botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
"What's interesting is our poll was taken before the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. While Biden tries to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, which blew through Louisiana last week, many Americans are not treating the recent events in Afghanistan lightly," Zogby acknowledged.
Considering Zogby Analytics had Biden's approval rating at 60-39 percent back in July, it will be very noteworthy to see how that high approval rating drops in subsequent polls.
Polls conducted as the crisis in Afghanistan worsened have seen Biden take a huge dip in his approval ratings, certainly but not solely because of that issue. The president's approval by specific issue has dropped across the board. While a majority still approve of how he's handled the pandemic, according to multiple polls, it's a much more slim majority than it once was.
The Zogby Analytics poll surveyed 2,173 Biden voters from August 5-13, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.