The White House should worry about recent polls showing low approval of President Joe Biden and concerns about his age, but the administration should not be too “preoccupied” with these numbers, a Democratic strategist told the Daily Caller.
Biden’s approval rating dropped to 39 percent, a two percent decline from July, while a majority of Americans, 73 percent, are concerned about the 80-year-old president’s age, according to a CNN poll, conducted by SSRS Research, an independent polling company. The recent polls show where the president has weaknesses, giving the White House a reason to have some concern, Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, told the Caller. (RELATED: KJP Leaves Jake Tapper Visibly Befuddled While Claiming Reporters Can’t Keep Up With Biden)
“Yes, [the White House] should be worried,” Bannon said. “The next question I’d ask is, ‘Should they be preoccupied with them?’ And the answer to that is no. I speak as a pollster here: polls are — and people forget this all the time — are snapshots in time and not moving pictures. Given the fact that we’re 14 months away from the presidential election, I wouldn’t be preoccupied with these polls, but if I was the Biden administration, I would be worried about them because they do show weaknesses.”
A record-low number of Americans, just 28 percent, believe that Biden “inspires confidence” while 26 percent of think that he has the stamina to be president, the CNN poll shows. About 70 percent think that things are going poorly in America, and 68 percent worry that the president is unable to understand the concerns of earlier generations.
Other polls showed similar trends, as 73 percent of Americans believe that Biden is too old to run for reelection in 2024, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. About 36 percent of voters think that the president “is mentally up for the job.”
While Bannon found the polls worrisome for the Biden administration, other Democratic strategists believe the polls aren’t something the White House should even pay attention to.
“Prior to the midterms, he had numbers like this or worse and he came out as one of the best sitting presidents as to the number of losses in the House [of Representatives] and keeping and gaining in the Senate,” Leslie Marshall, another Democratic strategist, told the Caller. “Joe Biden has never in this presidency made decisions based on the polls, and nor has this White House and it has served them well.”
Polls have become “very difficult to believe,” Marshall told the Caller, arguing that a president should govern based on facts rather than polls.
The White House and the Biden-Harris campaign have dismissed the poll results, instead choosing to tout the president’s record during his term, according to The Hill. The campaign told The Hill that they plan to win the election “by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about polls.”
“On November 1, 2022, CNN wrote, ‘The bottom is dropping out of the 2022 election for Democrats,'” Andrew Bates, White House deputy press secretary, told The Hill. “Days later, they wrote, ‘Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries.’ To be fair to CNN, they were far from alone. Polling is imperfect, especially in today’s environment.”
Bates referred the Caller to a tweet expressing similar views when asked for a comment.
.@CNN promises their breathless prophets have the flux capacitor on the right setting – this time.
11/1/22: “The bottom is dropping out of the 2022 election for Democrats” https://t.co/lXtFaTVTNU
11/7/22: “Democrats confront their nightmare scenario” https://t.co/YYmqr2Taij https://t.co/UbRjwoCSvy
— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) September 7, 2023
“The Biden White House is not going to be rattled by this because their view is there are going to be 500 polls between now and Election Day,” Kate Bedingfield, former White House communications director, told The Hill. “So what the Biden campaign is going to do is keep talking about his record, talking about how they’re making lives better for people.”
The president previously defended his age during a Labor Day speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, claiming that with age comes a “little bit of wisdom.”
“The president often says, ‘Don’t judge me against the Almighty. Judge me against the alternative.’ The reality is if Trump is the nominee the race will not be about Joe Biden, it will be a referendum on Trump,” Bannon told the Caller. “The administration should be worried. [The polls] show underlying weaknesses in the president’s standing. But should they be preoccupied with them? No, because there’s lots of time and Republicans have a tendency to self-destruct.”