President Joe Biden and his campaign must now answer the crucial question of whether the Democratic Party’s good performance on election night will translate to Biden’s own reelection effort.
The Biden team believes that key Biden agenda themes, like as abortion, aroused the voters they need on Tuesday, and will do so again in 2024. But on November 5, 2024, the president himself will be on the ballot, despite his own political liabilities (he’ll be 81 on Election Day, pushing the record for the oldest president in US history).
The latest AWN poll by SSRS displays alarming red flags for Biden, who is only liked by 39% of respondents. The same poll revealed that three-quarters of Americans are concerned about the president’s age and stamina.
It was a good night for democracy, Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters in the White House driveway on Wednesday, a rare move for a vice president. “I think the American people made clear that they are prepared to stand for freedom,” she said.
However, she did not deny the existence of obstacles, noting both she and Biden’s poll numbers have taken a beating in anticipation of next year’s presidential election.
“It was a good night,” she reflected. There is a lot of work to be done to ensure the president and I are reelected, but I am optimistic that we will succeed.
According to AWN’s poll, he is losing popularity among the crucial group of young voters, particularly among Black voters, whom he won by large numbers in 2020. With respect to the youth vote, Trump has 48% and Biden 47%. Compared to exit surveys in 2020, it also indicated a dramatic drop in support for Biden among voters of colour.
“Look, what we witnessed last night is MAGA extremism fail. Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks claimed as much during an appearance on “AWN This Morning” on Wednesday.
Voters across the country showed their support for a woman’s right to choose. The same voters who elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the vice presidency and the White House four years ago showed up again this year to show support for the same candidates.
Maxwell Frost, a progressive Gen Z representative and a Biden buddy, told AWN that the polls were worrying, especially the decline in support among young people.
“The polls do concern me,” he remarked Tuesday night on Capitol Hill. We must rebuild upon the foundation laid by the 2020 coalition. That appears to be in some jeopardy at the moment. I don’t think it’s far too gone at all. We need to make changes right now.
A senior Biden campaign official discounted AWN’s latest polling, and echoed campaign and White House officials who have frequently underlined persistent strength for Democratic policies in every election since Biden joined the White House in 2020.
Polls conducted a year in advance are, well, polls, and voter behaviour is voter behaviour. The latter is ultimately what determines who wins or loses in an election. “The people are always on our side when they get a chance to vote,” the official boasted.
The re-election of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky over Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron was one of the races the Biden campaign was keeping a close eye on.
Cameron spent $30 million on commercials in an unsuccessful attempt to link Beshear with Biden, according to the senior Biden campaign official.
“That was really a proxy fight in a Republican state to get after Joe Biden, and it failed. The official remarked, “And the radicalism continues to be something which drives voters off.
Whether or not that applies to Biden personally is still up in the air.
There hasn’t been a vote for Biden. According to AWN political journalist and former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, “voters have not rejected Joe Biden at the ballot box.”
Is age a factor?” she asked. Is it being discussed frequently? Yes. We certainly see that in the polling. But we also find that when the rubber meets the road and voters go to the polls, … the story doesn’t vote. Voting occurs.
The team is looking at the results from Tuesday with an emphasis on the areas in northern Kentucky where Beshear ran ads criticising Cameron’s pro-choice attitude.
“Without any exceptions, those counties performed extraordinarily well,” the official stated.
A second high-ranking official confirmed that Beshear carried the Eastern Kentucky county of Letcher, where Trump had won by a 59-point margin two years prior.
There were promising signs for the campaign in Ohio, where the second official pointed out that young voters, voters of colour, and people who identified as LGBT all voted in favour of reproductive rights.
And in Pennsylvania, the campaign said that absentee ballots from young voters had doubled since 2021.
The campaign recognises that communicating with diverse voter populations is difficult.
When asked by AWN if the campaign needed to do a better job drawing contrast, Fulks said, “Our aim is to figure out the best way to utilise these messages to reach voters most effectively as we head into next year.”
According to Fulks, “We are in an extremely fragmented media environment, and communicating with voters and America is more challenging than ever before.”
The president has frequently reassured donors that Vice President Biden is wise beyond his years, despite their fears about his stamina.
There is no room for on-the-job training at this time. We need your years of knowledge and wisdom right now. In matters of foreign policy, we require a steady hand. The direction of economic policy requires a firm hand. According to Fulks, “that’s what Joe Biden brings to the table.”
Efforts are also being made to highlight these distinctions, with the campaign using Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Miami as an opening to attack MAGA Republicans. Once again, Trump will be absent from the debate in favour of holding a rally in neighbouring Hialeah, Florida, as part of his own counterprogramming.
According to another campaign insider, a number of Biden surrogates will be “on the ground and on the airwaves” in South Florida.
The campaign and DNC are holding a “series of constituency engagement events focused specifically on the Latino community, Black voters, including an event in partnership with Rep. Federica Wilson targeted towards Black men, the Haitian community, and the LGBTQ+ community,” according to the official.
An “aggressive, bilingual rapid response” will also be implemented, along with new commercials aimed at Latinos and other initiatives “in key, high-traffic areas of Miami – including around the debate stage and Trump’s Hialeah rally.”
