Understanding Biden's unpopularity

Young Americans and Black Americans - two deeply Democratic groups - are surprisingly cool to him

I want to dig into some of the concerns about Joe Biden’s unpopularity. In some ways, he’s reasonably positioned for next year’s election, and may well be the strongest candidate Democrats could put forward. In others, he remains persistently, and mysteriously, unpopular.

A good way to dig into this is to compare Biden with the most recent Democratic president as he headed toward his reelection campaign. The figure below shows Gallup approval ratings for Barack Obama in December of 2011 and Joe Biden in December of 2023, both 11 months before the election. One striking thing is Biden is overall six points lower than Obama was — 37 to 43 — although both had almost the exact same approval rating among Democrats. (Although it should be noted that the percent of the country calling themselves Democrats is about 2-3 points lower than it was in 2011.)

Biden mostly trails Obama in other categories, although only modestly. Biden improves on Obama among older voters and among college graduates. But the most striking Biden disadvantages relative to Obama are among 18-29 year olds (50 vs 27 percent) and nonwhites (66 vs 49 percent). (Gallup did not have specific polling on Blacks, but this is consistent with the recent polling in the New York Times and elsewhere suggesting that Biden has recently lost ground among Black voters, even though they strongly supported him in 2020.) I want to address each of those in turn.