Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images 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 want to see someone else head the ticket, according to a New York Times/Siena College Research Institute survey 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% of Democrats under 30 said they want someone other than Biden to be their running mate, according to the survey.
CNBC Politics
Read more about CNBC’s political coverage: The president’s age and job performance were the top reasons Democratic respondents cited for wanting someone other than Biden to be the party’s nominee. 33% cited Biden’s age, while 32% cited his dissatisfaction with the job he did while in the White House. Just 13% of voters of all stripes say the United States is “on the right track,” while 77% said it was “headed in the wrong direction.” But there was one bright spot for Biden. According to the survey, Biden would likely beat former President Donald Trump again in the next election if it were held today. Trump has strongly suggested he will run for the White House for a third term in 2024. The poll found that 44 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would vote for Biden, compared to 41 percent who said they would support Trump, the Republican who won in 2020. The Times/Siena poll was conducted Tuesday through Thursday and polled 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 on Monday that found just 33 percent of respondents believe Biden deserves re-election, while 67 percent said he doesn’t deserve a second term. That’s 4 percentage points below the level of re-election support Trump saw in an April 2018 poll, which came more than two years before he faced Biden. The two polls 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 largest majority in the Senate, where they hold 48 seats and two independents who sit in the House. Vice President Kamala Harris’ power to break a tie in that chamber gives Democrats control despite the 50 Republican-held seats. In the Times/Siena poll, the top problems voters believe facing the U.S. were the economy, which 20 percent of respondents identified as the most important problem, followed by “inflation and the cost of living,” which the 15%. 11% of respondents identified “the state of democracy” or “political division” as their top concern, while 10% said gun policies were the most important problem. Abortion and women’s rights were cited as a top concern for 5% of respondents. The Supreme Court in a landmark ruling on June 24 said there is no federal right to abortion, reversing a nearly half-century-old opinion it handed down in Roe v. Wade. The decision is expected to eventually result in nearly half of US states banning or restricting abortion more tightly than in the past.
