President Biden will tout promising economic signs and his planned second term agenda during Thursday’s State of the Union address — but polls show he has yet to win back young and non-white Americans turned off by high prices.
A pair of Ipsos polls taken earlier this year found US adults by double-digit margins trust Biden’s presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, to better handle inflation and the economy.
Four in ten Americans would favor Trump’s economic approach if elected to a second non-consecutive term, compared with 30% who would prefer Biden, according to a January Ipsos survey.
The following month, Trump had even higher marks, with 43% of respondents saying they trusted him more to handle the economy and 31% saying they trusted Biden more.
The same percentage currently trust the incumbent more to lower inflation, whereas 41% trust Trump more on that issue.
“That’s been Biden’s Achilles heel,” Ipsos president of public affairs Cliff Young told The Post. “He’s weak on that for a variety of reasons, but he’s weak on that.”
“He still has a problem with younger voters, with minorities, with less-affluent, less-educated voters — and he lost them for the most part because of inflation,” Young explained.
Those voters include traditional Republican leaners who helped hand Biden the presidency in 2020 — but are swinging back toward Trump with eight months to before Election Day, he added.
“He really needs to shore them up,” Young emphasized, added that Biden also needs to retain Democratic voters concerned about purported threats to democracy, a proxy for the anti-Trump vote.
The president is expected once again Thursday night to tout his “Bidenomics” economic agenda, which supported massive public investments in infrastructure and renewable energy.
Biden has also hailed his administration’s success in creating jobs and lowering unemployment, while accusing billionaires of not paying their “fair share” in income taxes and corporations of shrinking the size of common goods without lowering their prices.
“Bidenomics is about the future. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before,” he said at a campaign event in Chicago last June.
“We created 13.4 million new jobs — more jobs in two years than any president has ever made in four.”
But under Biden, inflation also hit a 40-year high in June 2022 — a 9.1% rate on the consumer price index. As of January, the CPI had fallen back to 3.1%, still above the pre-COVID pandemic rate, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Young also cautioned the president against relying too heavily on trends that delivered Democrats better-than-expected results in the 2022 midterms, including leaning into issues like abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
“The Dobbs decision, or abortion more specifically,” Young said of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling, “it’s one of the symbols of the anti-Trump vote.”
“It has less to do with this specific issue and more to do with the general problem, obviously from the Democratic perspective, a general problem of Trump,” he added. “And so it’s a mobilizing force, it gets you out of bed and then you go to the polls.”
A proper posture on the critical issues for voters could also be enough to shield the 81-year-old Biden from an obvious weakness: his age.
“Fifty-nine percent of the population think that both Biden and Trump are too old,” Young said, referring to the most recent Ipsos survey. “Twenty-seven percent think that Biden exclusively is too old, versus only 3% for Trump.”
Notably, Young added that with the suspension of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign on Wednesday, it was “less important” for Biden to make a “conscious” effort in appealing to those voters than shoring up his core constituency.
“He just needs to double down, really reinforce … that the economy is improving, show the things he’s done to help it but he’s not got any credit,” Young said.
“And then really talk about, if he doesn’t frame it as democracy in the State of the Union, framing it as sort of fixing of broken America or ensuring a vivacious sort of America will be an important thing.”
