Biden’s Latest Brutal Batch of Polls

Plus: What is Nikki Haley thinking?

Lots to talk about today: Another batch of grisly polls for Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley hedging on whether she feels bound to endorse Donald Trump as Super Tuesday looms. But first, a quick acknowledgement of Iowa’s basketball’s Caitlin Clark, who passed Pete Maravich to set the all-time NCAA scoring record yesterday.

Happy Monday.

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U.S. President Joe Biden. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.)

Is Denial a River in Delaware?

Denial is underrated. 

Could we make it through the trials and tribulations of life without this coping mechanism? Are we set up psychologically to function without a little willful blindness to the harsher aspects of reality? Denial is part of the human condition.

So I’m not altogether anti-denial. But I am anti-denial when it gets in the way of acting responsibly to deal with a problem.

Isn’t Joe Biden’s denial about his weakness as a 2024 presidential candidate making a second term for Donald Trump more likely?

Joe Biden was the right man to defeat Trump in 2020. He’s been a pretty good president. But Joe Biden is likely to lose the presidency to Trump in 2024.

And it is not too late to address this problem.

Of course Biden could win. But four different and reputable polls this past weekend have him behind, and the reasons he’s trailing will be hard to fix in the next eight months.

They’ll be hard to fix because whatever particular complaints about his policies or views people have, they’ve now coalesced—fairly or unfairly—into a general negative judgment of his presidency. And that judgment is influenced and reinforced by judgments about his age.

Brutal numbers for Biden abound in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released this weekend. The alarming topline: Trump leads Biden among registered voters, 48 percent to 43 percent.

While Trump’s favorability is virtually unchanged from October 2020 to today—43 percent favorable/54 percent unfavorable then, 44 percent favorable/54 percent unfavorable now—Biden has moved from a 52 percent favorable/42 percent unfavorable rating in October 2020 to 38 percent favorable/59 percent unfavorable today.

That’s favorability. As for Biden’s job performance as president, 19 percent of voters strongly approve and 19 percent somewhat approve. Meanwhile, 12 percent somewhat disapprove, and an astonishing 47 percent strongly disapprove. (The NBC News poll a month ago similarly had 49 percent strongly disapproving.)

Add on top that 73 percent of all voters agree with the statement that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president,” with 47 percent strongly agreeing. (Forty-two percent of voters agree with that judgment of Trump, with 21 percent strongly agreeing.) Sixty-one percent of voters who backed Biden four years ago agree with the statement.

Nate Cohn of the New York Times summarizes: “Why is Mr. Biden losing? . . . Mr. Biden is very unpopular. He’s so unpopular that he’s now even less popular than Mr. Trump, who remains every bit as unpopular as he was four years ago.”

Voters could learn over the next eight months to disapprove of Biden less, or fear Trump more. Their concerns over his age could lessen.

But those judgments are going to be very hard to change.

There is a simple way to deal with the twin problems of incumbency and age: Joe Biden could step aside in favor of a non-80-year-old, non-incumbent Democratic nominee.

Does this have its own challenges? Of course.

Is it guaranteed to work? Of course not.

But voters aren’t crazy about Trump. And there are plenty of moderate Democratic governors, along with some senators and House members, who’ve shown an ability to win elections, often quite handily, often in swing states, in the last few years.

It’s true that Trump’s old, too, and that he seems to be showing his age more on the stump. A Democratic candidate who’s a generation younger than Trump could benefit from that.

So Joe Biden should seriously consider stepping aside. It would have been easier if he’d done so a year ago, but that’s no reason not to do so now. The risks of staying the course seem to me to be greater than the risks of a course correction.

As Hobbes the tiger points out, “denial springs eternal.” But still, denial is a choice. Accepting reality may not be an easier choice, but it’s a better one. 

—William Kristol 

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Who Can Know the Mind of Nikki?

Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday knockout punch is just around the corner. As Republican voters in sixteen states head to the primary polls tomorrow, Haley would need what NBC’s Steve Kornacki this weekend calls “the mother of all political miracles” just to stay competitive. She may have picked up her first outright victory of the cycle over the weekend, winning D.C.’s tiny GOP primary, and her 25 to 40 percent vote share in other contests so far has been respectable. But even the upper-range outcome there won’t cut it on Super Tuesday, with its gauntlet of delegate-rich winner-take-all or near-winner-take-all states, from California to Texas.

No sane candidate tips their hand in advance when they’re going to drop out of a race. So we may get a sense this week of just how deep into the primary Haley intends to take her small band of merry delegates. 

Haley continues to hit Donald Trump at every opportunity, although even at this late date she still takes a bit of heat off every punch. Her Meet the Press interview Sunday was emblematic of her whole campaign in that way, with Haley never quite sticking in the knife the way NBC’s Kristen Welker set her up to. 

Is Trump practically and morally responsible for January 6th, Welker asked, as Mitch McConnell has said? “What Trump’s role is is not that he had the rally in the first place,” Haley replied. “That’s what we do in America. The problem is when he had the opportunity to stop it. You know, you had everybody from Fox News anchors to friends to family begging him to say something to get them to stop, including his vice president. And he was silent.” 

So is he practically and morally responsible? “We’re going to find out,” Haley said. “That’s what I think the courts are going to have to play with and figure out how they’re going to do it. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not going to try and play in that.” 

Does Haley think Trump would follow the Constitution if he were elected again? 

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Haley said. “I mean, you always want to think someone will. But I don’t know. When you go in and talk about revenge, when you go and you talk about vindication, when you go and you talk about—what does that mean? Like, I don’t know what that means.” 

These are highly guarded, careful sentiments: Do we really need to rely on the courts to judge whether Trump was morally responsible for January 6th, and does Haley really expect us to believe she doesn’t know what he means when he talks about vengeance and retribution? It’s a sign of how captured the entire GOP has become that even these statements put Haley pretty much on an island by herself. 

Here’s the central paradox of Haley’s continuing campaign: She either sees a path to burying the hatchet with Trump and remaining a member in good standing of his GOP, or she doesn’t. If she does, why is she still in the race? If she doesn’t, why is she still pulling the punch?

Does she still consider herself bound by her pledge to the Republican National Committee to endorse the eventual Republican nominee? On this question, too, Haley was cagey on Meet the Press. 

“I have always said that I have serious concerns about Donald Trump. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden,” Haley said. “The RNC pledge . . . The RNC is now not the same RNC. Now it’s Trump’s daughter-in-law. I think I’ll make what decision I want to make. But that’s not something I’m thinking about.” 

—Andrew Egger

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Catching up . . .

• Nikki Haley says she’s no longer bound by RNC pledge to endorse Trump if he wins: NBC News

• Trump’s allies ramp up campaign targeting voter rolls: New York Times

• Mayorkas: Executive orders aren’t enough to solve the migrant crisis: Politico

• GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin predicts House will pass potential new border-Ukraine deal: CNN

• GOP senators caution Trump about getting involved in McConnell succession race: Axios

• Americans overwhelmingly support keeping IVF legal for women, CBS poll finds: Politico

• Nikki Haley calls for ‘protections’ for embryos but says she supports IVF as it’s practiced in U.S.: NBC News

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Quick Hits: Hunter Hits Back

On the site today, A.B. Stoddard ponders: Is Hunter Biden . . . winning?

For years Republicans have promised their voters that Hunter, the nude guy with the crack pipe in the pictures they keep seeing, had made millions getting his father to help out his foreign clients, including foreign governments, with policy favors. They insisted the president was getting a cut. The “Biden crime family” was even involved in “prostitution rings.”

Month after month, they have failed to locate evidence supporting any of this. Yet Republicans cannot abandon their goal of impeaching the president—Donald Trump won’t let them. So the role of Hunter as punching bag has grown even more central over time.

Their apparent strategy has been to arrange an interview behind closed doors with a sheepish and ashamed Hunter, and then leak out cherry-picked portions that seemed damaging. This would go over well on Fox News, help Republicans raise a lot of cash, and deflect from the fact that they have neither high crime nor misdemeanor and may never have even hold a vote on the House floor.

Hunter’s response? Come at me, bro.

In December Hunter demanded a public hearing, which Republicans refused. He defied a subpoena and busted into the Oversight Committee on January 10, asking why they would not depose him in public. His Trumpian spectacle embarrassed Republicans, causing Rep. Nancy Mace to become unhinged. She yelled at him for the “epitome of white privilege,” and declared he should be arrested and go to jail that day.

Last week Republicans finally deposed Hunter and embarrassed themselves again. After more than six hours of testimony on Wednesday, Republicans still have no bombshell bribery scandal. The Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, left early after not asking Hunter a single question. Rep. Andy Biggs warned before the transcript was released that it would make Hunter look good because “they did a great job prepping.”

Read the whole thing.

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