The Hard Truth About Joe Biden’s Historical Unpopularity In National Polls

The Biden campaign continues to struggle in the polls, causing angst, hand-wringing and other signs of panic among the Democratic faithful. Diagnosing those polling ills has become a cottage industry.

But as Politico's Jack Shafer reminds us, the simplest explanation for Mr. Bidens bad numbers is that he was never that popular to begin with:

The tough truth for Biden, one that the press seems to have avoided, is that he has always been unpopular. Although he has long been in the public eye — he served avuncularly as a U.S. senator for 36 years before becoming vice president — being the toast of Delaware, which is the second smallest state and the sixth least populous, doesn't readily convert into national acclaim. His 1988 campaign for president ended abruptly, as he dropped out of the race after three months amid a plagiarism scandal. Then in the 2008 presidential campaign, he found such low favor among voters that he placed fifth in the Iowa caucuses and then exited.

In the 2020 contest, running in a crowded primary field, Biden rarely broke the 30 percent mark. Biden won the nomination not because he was popular but because he was running as a centrist in a field clogged with progressives. He also had the good political fortune to emerge as the last moderate candidate standing against socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Establishment Democrats didn't love Joe as much as they disliked Sanders and wanted a candidate around whom they could coalesce.

That's about right. And the data from the 2020 Democratic primaries supports the idea that Biden's pre-election, national polling lead over the rest of the Democratic field was misleading. After a fourth place finish in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, second in Nevada…there was a chance Biden would strike out in his third bid for the nomination.

Not until the South Carolina primary, with the support of Rep. Jim Clyburn's political machine, did Biden finally win a primary, find his national footing and go on to beat incumbent Donald Trump. 

But even on that significant score, Shafer writes that Biden's win had a distinct medicinal quality:

…[it] wasn't a mandate on his popularity. It was a flight to safety for a nation fed up with a meshuga president. Biden was merely the vegetable voters convinced themselves they had to eat in order to rid themselves of Trump.

And not all the industrial policy giveaways and hectoring lectures on how we've never had it so good will ever change that.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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