Biden’s Support May Be Slipping Among Minority, Non-College Educated Voters: Poll

Democratic political committees are spinning into action, apparently attempting to court a demographic of voters that recent polling suggests has softened in its support for President Biden since 2020.New polling from the New York Times and Siena College find that Mr. Biden and President Trump are in a dead heat more than 15 months out from the 2024 general election, with both candidates polling at 43 percent support.A conspicuous soft spot in terms of support for Mr. Biden, though, is in the demographic of non-white, non-college educated voters. Among this demographic, the poll found Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by 16 points, 49 percent to 33 percent.For comparison, a Catalist analysis of 2020 voting data found that Mr. Biden won this demographic of voters by 48 points in 2020. President Obama won this demographic by 67 points in 2012.In the past, non-white, working-class voters have been a key part of the Democratic coalition and will likely be a key demographic of any potential Democratic victory in 2024.Perhaps aware of this softening support, the Future Forward US Action committee, a Democratic panel helping to spearhead efforts to re-elect Mr. Biden, is airing a new nationwide ad targeting issues relevant to working-class Americans.“Being middle class right now, it’s tough making ends meet, for sure. Republicans in Congress say if we just cut taxes even more for the biggest corporations the money will eventually, someday, trickle trickle down to you,” the ads’s speaker says. “Right.”The ad adds that “Joe Biden would rather just stop those corporations from charging so damn much,” before extolling Mr. Biden’s plans to cap prescription drug costs and to limit junk fees and surprise medical bills.While one ad more than a year out from the election may not move the needle much, it demonstrates the sort of messaging Americans should expect from Mr. Biden’s campaign and the committees supporting him and other Democrats next year.A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Ruy Teixeira, in an analysis of the apparent slip in support among non-white, non-college educated voters, suggested that the Democratic Party was becoming too liberal for this demographic of voters.Mr. Teixeira cited AEI’s Survey Center on American Life conducted with the National Opinion Research Center to argue that Democrats were out of touch with non-college educated, non-white voters on issues of structural racism, public safety, transgender athletes’ participation in sports, and renewable energy.“In 2020, very few Democrats thought their support against the hated and presumably toxic Trump could possibly slip among nonwhite working-class voters,” Mr. Teixera wrote. “But it did. I wouldn’t be so sure it couldn’t happen again.”One caveat is that according to the poll, discussions of the distinctions between views of what constitutes racism and transgender issues as a whole did not register as motivating factors for voting, according to the NORC poll.While 9 percent of Democratic-leaning voters ranked addressing issues of race as their first or second priority, the poll didn’t distinguish between notions of structural and individual racism. Addressing issues of race was less important to Republican voters, with only 3 percent ranking it as a first or second most important issue.Among both Democratic and Republican voters, just 2 percent ranked “addressing transgender issues” as their first or second priority for their party.The top issue for Democrats was making healthcare more affordable, with 28 percent ranking it as their first or second priority. For Republicans, the top issue was strengthening the nation’s economy, with 46 percent ranking it as their first or second priority.The Times’s editor of news surveys, Ruth Igielnik, in conversation with FiveThirtyEight, also qualified the poll’s findings on the opinions of non-white, non-college educated voters, saying that the sample sizes were too small to be a source of concrete conclusions.“I think that the data on Black men for example — our sample sizes are far too small and we would really need to do an oversample to know for sure that anything has really changed,” she said.Ms. Igienik added that she would give “the same answer for Hispanics,” later qualifying that other polling data has led her to conclude that “there might be something real to the sort of shift among Hispanic voters.”

Biden’s Support May Be Slipping Among Minority, Non-College Educated Voters: Poll

Biden’s Support May Be Slipping Among Minority, Non-College Educated Voters: Poll

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