As President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign stumbles toward next year’s election, his approval rating remains deeply underwater.
While Biden has long struggled to gain support among various demographics, Axios recently reported on one voting bloc that, despite its traditionally Democratic-aligned record, is increasingly turning against the incumbent.
Citing a recent poll, fewer than half of the Black and Latino voters without a college degree who were surveyed are supporting the president. In fact, their support for former President Donald Trump is just 16 points lower — 49% to 33% — despite the group’s long history of reliably voting for Democratic candidates.
Barack Obama won non-white working-class voters by 67 points in 2012. Biden's lead has crashed to 16 points and last week he failed to win a majority of them. Woke politics is very unpopular among these voters.https://t.co/l0uIYtSh0W
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) August 8, 2023
Comparing current polls to the outcome of previous elections reveals how much support Biden has lost. Biden won the demographic by a staggering 48-point margin over Trump in 2020, and Barack Obama did even better in 2012 with a 67-point lead over GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
As recently as last year’s midterms, Democrats were able to clinch 62% of the Hispanic vote, which was roughly the same percentage Biden received two years earlier.
While there is some debate over the biggest cause for this rapid shift away from Biden, left-leaning political scholar Ruy Teixiera identified several of the likeliest factors.
For starters, he pointed out that 61% of non-White working-class voters reject the idea that racism is “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions,” as evidenced by a recent poll. Meanwhile, liberal White college graduates endorsed the notion of structural racism by a margin of 82% to 18%.
“That tells you a lot about who influences the Democratic Party today and who does not,” Teixiera wrote.
He similarly used polling results to conclude that the party is out of step with this once-loyal voting bloc on issues including public safety — 63% said “we need to fully fund the budget for police departments” — and transgender athletes — 70% said they should “only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender.”
“In 2020, very few Democrats thought their support against the hated and presumably toxic Trump could possibly slip among nonwhite working-class voters,” Teixiera concluded. “But it did. I wouldn’t be so sure it couldn’t happen again. Possibly none of this will matter if Trump’s third indictment makes a bigger dent in his standing than his first and second indictments did. But I would not count on it.”
