US President Joe Biden has hit another rock bottom. A latest opinion poll is showing him with an approval of just 36 per cent, a drop of two points from last month and equalling the low he had in July 2022. Although a raft of surveys are showing the incumbent and his challenger, the former President Donald Trump, in a dead heat nationally, in most of the battleground states Biden is trailing.

The Biden campaign team must be nervously watching the charts especially with groups the Democrats have had nothing to worry about in the past. The Blacks and Jews are two groups that the Biden team are vigorously courting in recent days, knowing full well that even a small drop in their numbers spells trouble.

A recent Pew Research Center study showed that 83 per cent of registered Black voters lean Democratic, but this is a 5 per cent decline from 2020. Cutting across educational levels a solid majority of Black voters have been with the Democrats but the numbers point to a downtrend: 93 per cent of Black voters with college degrees identified themselves as, or leaned towards, Democrats in 2012; but then it dropped to 85 per cent in 2020 and 79 per cent in 2023.

Margin shrinking

There are other things that would seem bothersome going by the Pew study: 77 per cent of Black voters have said they would vote or lean towards Biden as opposed to 18 per cent for Trump. This may be passed off as nothing out of the ordinary; but that wide margin between Black preferences for Democrats and Republicans also seems to be shrinking. It has been pointed out that in 2016 the share of Black voters for Hillary Clinton and Trump was 91 per cent versus 6 per cent; and in 2020 Biden had a 92 to 8 per cent advantage. But the current margin of support for Biden is lower than it was in either 2020 or in 2016.

The economy has been the top priority for all Americans in their evaluation of a President; and it is here that Trump gets a more favourable rating than the incumbent; and Biden trails Trump on issues of immigration and foreign policy. But Black voters, it is being pointed out, have cited improving the educational system, strengthening the social security system, reducing healthcare costs, dealing with problems of the poor and crime also as important issues. Biden reaching out to the Black community through his Commencement address at the prestigious all male Black Morehouse college in Atlanta was as critical as in reaching out to the Jewish community in the aftermath of the stepped up campus protests over what is taking place in Gaza.

Like Blacks, Jews have solidly supported Biden especially in many of the battleground states where Jewish voters, estimated at between one and three per cent, made the difference in 2020 and are relied on in a close race in 2024.

There are some in the Jewish community who are not quite certain of the commitment of President Biden to Israel. “There seems to be two Bidens,” says the long-time former Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, a reference to a President who flew to Israel last October as a way of showing support and another Biden who is managed by the political establishment, even trying to strike a balance between anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia. And the warning from Foxman is direct and dire: “It seems that (Biden’s) political advisors have concluded that the Jews have no political option as 75 per cent are Democratic liberals and will not vote for Trump. I believe they are making a mistake taking the Jewish vote for granted.”

In normal campaigning, President Biden would be spending his time scaring the wits out of the American voter on Trump’s Hitler and Third Reich rhetoric. But these are extraordinary times where the incumbent is trying to balance his own base with the Blacks, the traditional Jewish community, the progressive Jews calling for the administration to act more forcefully in Gaza and Arab-Americans who seem to have written off Biden and the Democrats.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations

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