U.S. President Joe Biden delivers the speech during the graduation and commissioning ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy Memorial Stadium on May 27, 2022 in Annapolis, Maryland.
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A large majority of Democrats want someone other than President Joe Biden to be their party’s nominee for the White House in 2024, according to a new poll.
Just 26 percent of Democrats said they would prefer Biden as their party’s nominee, with 64 percent saying they wanted to see someone else head the ticket, according to The New York Times/Siena College Research Institute poll of registered voters.
While that finding is potentially very bad news for the 79-year-old incumbent’s re-election hopes, the poll has even worse news for Biden when it comes to younger Democratic voters and how all voters see the direction of the country .
A whopping 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 said they wanted someone other than Biden to be their running mate, the survey found.
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The president’s age and job were the top reasons cited by Democratic respondents for wanting a candidate other than Biden to be the party’s nominee. Thirty-three percent cited Biden’s age, while 32% cited dissatisfaction with the job he has done while in the White House.
Just 13 percent of voters of all stripes say the United States is “on the right track,” while 77 percent say it’s “headed in the wrong direction.”
But there was one bright spot for Biden.
According to the poll, Biden would likely beat former President Donald Trump again in the next election if held today. Trump has strongly hinted that he will run for the White House for a third term in 2024.
The survey found that 44 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would vote for Biden, compared with 41 percent who said they would support Trump, the Republican he defeated in 2020.
The Times/Siena poll was conducted Tuesday through Thursday and surveyed 849 voters. It had a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points.
The poll comes nearly 18 months into Biden’s first term in the White House.
Gallup released a new poll Monday that found just 33 percent of those polled think Biden deserves re-election, while 67 percent say he doesn’t deserve a second term. That’s 4 percentage points lower than the level of support for Trump’s re-election seen in an April 2018 poll conducted more than two years before he faced off against Biden.
The two surveys also come less than four months before midterm congressional elections in early November.
Biden’s fellow Democrats hold a majority of just 10 seats in the House of Representatives. Democrats hold the smallest majority in the Senate, where they have 48 seats and two independents who vote with them. Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking power in that chamber gives Democrats control, even though 50 Republicans hold seats.
In the Times/Siena poll, the top problems voters think the U.S. faces are the economy, which 20 percent of respondents identify as the most important issue, followed by “inflation and the cost of living,” which 15 percent identify.
Eleven percent of respondents ranked the “state of democracy” or “political division” as their top concern, while 10 percent said gun policies were the most important issue.
Abortion and women’s rights are listed as the biggest issue for 5% of respondents.
The Supreme Court in a major ruling June 24 said there is no federal right to abortion, overturning a nearly half-century-old ruling in Roe v. Wade. The decision is expected to eventually lead to bans or tighter restrictions on abortions than were previously the case in nearly half of US states.
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