Democrats Have Doubts About Joe Biden. Biden’s Team Isn’t Worried.

For all of the accomplishments, legislative and electoral, of President Joe Biden’s first term, he starts his reelection bid staring a very uncomfortable fact in the face: Even a majority of Democratic primary voters do not want him to run for president again.

Similar results have come up again and again in polling, coupled with his persistently underwater approval rating and concerns about his age and acuity throughout the electorate. It would seem to make him ripe for a primary challenge, but no contender within the Democratic mainstream has emerged. It has left some Democratic operatives fearful the party is sleepwalking into a potential electoral disaster.

Faiz Shakir, a progressive operative who ran Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, summarized the ambivalent feelings about Biden and a potential contest against former President Donald Trump.

Biden is “not seen as a strong leader. He’s got all of his problems and issues,” Shakir told HuffPost, arguing that Biden’s penchant for seeking consensus can sometimes make him seem less assertive. “That said, I do think he can beat Trump in a rematch.”

Interviews with Democratic operatives and voters show the anxiety is mostly rooted in Biden’s status as an octogenarian and the occasional falls and verbal flubs that spring from it. While there is some frustration with inflation and the way two rogue Democratic senators flustered Biden’s grandest ambitions, much of the worry among Democratic voters — ironically, for anyone who lived through the 2020 Democratic primaries — now focuses on Biden’s electability and whether swing voters will cast a ballot for an 80-something who often sounds like an 80-something.

“The only person he can beat is Donald Trump,” said a progressive Democratic strategist with experience in battleground states, who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships. “He loses to anyone else based on optics: ‘All right, we just had two old presidents. Let’s have a young family in there.’”

Biden and his team have sought to neutralize both Republican attacks about his age, and the angst that those attacks induce in Democrats, by alternately making light of the topic and chiding the press for focusing on it too much. In remarks to abortion rights groups following their endorsements on Friday, Biden joked, “I know I’m 198 years old, but all kidding aside, think about that. I never ever thought I’d be signing an executive order protecting the right to contraception.” The joke drew loud laughs from the crowd.

Meanwhile, on social media, senior White House aides like Communications Director Ben LaBolt were circulating an analysis by liberal watchdog Media Matters that panned mainstream media outlets for treating Biden’s age as a much bigger issue than Trump’s. The subtitle of the piece is: “Even though Biden is only three years older than Trump, 89% of candidate age mentions were about Biden.”

There is little doubt Biden will coast toward the nomination. While early polls have shown surprising amounts of support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with many views outside the party’s mainstream, the Democratic National Committee has not scheduled any primary debates and is slated to strip convention delegates from candidates like Kennedy who compete in unsanctioned nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Interest groups who could provide important backing for a challenger are instead flocking to Biden’s side.

“If anyone had the balls to take him on who is legitimate — like a [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer or a [Sen. Raphael] Warnock — they’d become a legend and they’d be the nominee,” the progressive Democratic strategist said, requesting anonymity to freely criticize their party’s leader. “But the thing is, you can’t take him on, because there is no primary. There are no debates. There’s nothing going on.”

Biden’s campaign and his allies maintain the most indicative poll was the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats grew their majority in the Senate and lost the House only narrowly, one of the best performances for the party in the White House during a midterm election in modern political history.

“Americans really don’t like the MAGA agenda and have rejected it in resounding numbers — not once but twice,” a Biden campaign adviser told HuffPost, requesting anonymity to speak freely about campaign strategy.

Sure enough, an NBC News poll out Sunday showed Biden with higher net favorability ratings than either Trump or 2024 GOP contender Ron DeSantis. (The same poll showed Biden leading Trump by 4 percentage points in a hypothetical contest, but tied with DeSantis.)

They also dismiss his underwhelming polling with Democrats as the product of off-year anxieties typical of an incumbent at this stage of his presidency.

Then-President Barack Obama’s nationwide approval rating, as measured by Gallup, reached a new low of 40% in July 2011 — just a point higher than Biden’s standing in the most recent Gallup poll, which came out in May.

In the fall of 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton polled better than Obama in hypothetical matchups against Mitt Romney and other Republican presidential contenders.

Many voters “just don’t want to hear about” the presidential race right now, the Biden adviser said. “They’re not ready to talk about it. They’re not all in and that’s fine.”

“We have to remind people of the stakes and we will do that,” the adviser added.

To that end, Biden has begun taking advantage of public appearances to promote his economic accomplishments. His campaign plans to highlight the ways the investments made possible by the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act are at once reducing the effects of climate change and igniting a new domestic manufacturing boom. Biden is set to deliver a speech in Chicago this Wednesday on “Bidenomics,” an economic philosophy he plans to contrast with the trickle-down economics long favored by the GOP.

“It’s the best argument he’s got in a country where citizens seem to be fighting each other from all sides,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a moderate Democratic strategist in New York City. “If he can make that case in the Midwest, he’s likely to reduce some of the alienation” that has helped Trump in that region.

Another way the campaign is clarifying the stakes of the contest for voters is by showcasing Democratic institutional unity at a time when Republican presidential candidates are squabbling for their party’s nomination.

“It’s a contrast with where Republicans are, which is fighting the culture war and fighting each other,” the Biden adviser said.

Three of the country’s leading abortion rights groups endorsed Biden’s reelection on Friday, following a similar coordinated announcement by four top environmental groups earlier this month.

Organized labor’s show of support has perhaps been the most forceful. On June 16, the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions, and several individual unions announced their endorsements of Biden, hailing Biden as the “most pro-union president in our lifetimes.” The next day, those labor groups hosted a raucous rally for Biden in Philadelphia, marking the first major campaign event of Biden’s bid for a second term.

The AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Biden was the earliest that the federation has weighed in on a presidential race in the organization’s history.

That distinction is especially notable, because of the contrast it strikes with organized labor’s treatment of then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the last Democratic president to face a serious primary challenge. Then-Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, RFK Jr.’s uncle, ran against Carter from the left, but unlike RFK Jr.’s current run, the elder Kennedy’s campaign was credible and competitive.

During that primary, several labor unions backed Kennedy over Carter, after taking issue with, among other things, Carter’s deregulation of the trucking and airline industries. The AFL-CIO endorsed Carter only after he had locked up the nomination, two months before Election Day. And several of its member unions declined to endorse Carter altogether. This cycle, there is no comparable attrition from Democratic-aligned groups.

“I haven’t heard a peep about any credible challenge to Joe Biden. I haven’t heard a peep about anyone making any plans to run against Joe Biden, now or in the future,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “So the only people I hear talking about this are in the media.”

That’s not exactly true. Following Biden’s rally in Philadelphia, HuffPost spoke to a number of Democratic-leaning voters outside a grocery store in Ardmore, an upper-middle-class suburb.

Several of them brought up Biden’s age or a desire for an alternative candidate. But, supporting Team Biden’s theory that current polling says little about whether Democrats and moderates will support Biden in November 2024, no one’s concerns were enough to rule out voting for Biden.

Jim Waddington, an accountant and self-described moderate who voted for Biden in 2020, is not looking forward to voting for Biden again. A fiscal conservative with progressive social views, he described himself as “very concerned” about Biden’s age and mental acuity.

“I’ve just seen him in multiple interviews, either like fumbling over words or not being able to remember or not having coherent sentences,” he said.

Jim’s wife Sarah, a project manager and new U.S. citizen, expressed similar disappointment with the choices facing her.

A rematch between Trump and Biden “would just rob everyone from an actual conversation,” Sarah said.

Should Trump win the Republican nomination, though, Jim and Sarah expect to vote for Biden, even as they told HuffPost that they would prefer to have more choices in the Democratic field. They do not see RFK Jr. or author Marianne Williamson, who has also entered the field, as viable options.

“You’ve written books — how can we make sure you’ll ‘unstuck’ the situation?” Sarah said of Williamson. “Kennedy, I think his anti-vaxx conspiracy theory side is just a turnoff.”

Mary Ann Buckley, a semi-retired educator from Rosemont, Pennsylvania, said she is “not dissatisfied” with Biden and plans to vote for him.

“I don’t think he’s doing poorly because of his age,” said Buckley, who told HuffPost that she is older than Biden. “But I wish there were alternatives of younger people in the Democratic Party. There’s no way I could vote for anybody in the Republican Party.”

Of course, Biden cannot win the general election with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents alone. And some less reliable voters may have a hard time putting Biden’s policies ahead of their concerns about his age and fitness for office.

“Whether it’s overstated or not, is not the issue. It’s what people perceive it to be,” Sheinkopf said. “That they perceive that his cognitive decline is serious makes it a much more significant problem.”

Sheinkopf shared the view of other Democratic strategists with whom HuffPost spoke who believe that Trump is the easiest Republican for Biden to beat — because he has defeated Trump before, Trump is under indictment, and at age 77, Trump’s use of the age card is less convincing.

Democrats hoping for a rematch might just get their wish. Trump’s national lead over DeSantis, his nearest GOP competitor in the polls, currently exceeds 30 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.