Washington: The first significant political event for the US president since he declared his candidature for re-election in April saw Joe Biden return to the campaign road for a rally with union members in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Biden, who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, received a warm welcome from the crowd. But there are fears among Democrats that there is a lack of enthusiasm for the 80-year-old president’s bid for a second term. There are no credible opponents for Biden to win his party's candidature in 2024. Only two Democrats have run primary challenges to him thus far: self-help author Marianne Williamson and environmental lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr., both of whom lack a realistic chance of winning the Democratic nomination.
Yet national opinion polls show that, combined, the two candidates command the support of more than 20 per cent of the Democratic electorate, while Biden battles persistently low approval ratings. According to the FiveThirtyEight website’s average of national opinion polls, 40.6 per cent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing, while 54.9 per cent disapprove.
“There is weakness there for Biden, no doubt,” said Kyle Kondik of the nonpartisan University of Virginia Center for Politics, who pointed to several recent surveys showing a majority of Democratic voters would prefer someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee in 2024.
Biden allies argue that having defeated Donald Trump once already, he is best positioned to take on his predecessor in 2024. But several recent opinion polls show Biden and Trump in a statistical tie in a hypothetical head-to-head contest.