By Paul Steinhauser
THE CONCORD MONITOR
A majority of Democrats in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state don’t want President Joe Biden to seek a second term in 2024, according to a new survey.
A poll from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center released on Tuesday suggests the president is tied with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg when Democratic respondents were asked which potential candidate they would support in their party’ s 2024 presidential primary.
Only 31% of likely Democratic presidential primary voters questioned said they wanted the president to run for re-election, with 59% saying they don’t want Biden to bid for a second term. Support for a Biden re-election run among New Hampshire Democrats, which stood at 74% in June of last year, dropped 20 points to 54% in UNH’s survey from last month, and plummeted another 23 points in their latest poll.
The president’s favorable rating in the latest survey among New Hampshire Democrats sank to 42%.
UNH Survey Center director Andrew Smith, pointing to the rough climate Democrats in New Hampshire and around the country are facing in this year’s election due to soaring inflation and the president’s deeply negative approval ratings, noted that “the election doesn’t look good for Democrats. And when things don’t go well, just like in sports, you can’t fire the team, so you fire the coach. And I think the Democrats are looking to have a new coach come in in the 2024 election.”
Three-quarters of self-described Granite State Democrats questioned in the poll said they were very or somewhat concerned about Biden’s age.
The president has repeatedly said he’ll seek a second term if he remains healthy, but that hasn’t stemmed speculation for more than a year regarding whether the 79-year-old president will run for re-election. Biden made history in 2020 when he became the oldest person ever elected president. If he campaigns for a second term and wins, the president would be 82 at his second inauguration and 86 at the end of his second term.
The release of the UNH survey follows a handful of recent national polls which indicated that a majority of Americans don’t want Biden to run again.
The UNH Survey Center asked likely Democratic primary voters to choose whom they’d back at this very early point in the next presidential nomination race, and were given of a list of potential White House hopefuls.
Buttigieg, who came in second in the 2020 New Hampshire primary, was the choice of 17% of respondents, with Biden at 16%. The president placed fourth in the 2020 primary.
Smith noted that “name recognition” was fueling the hypothetical primary figures and added that “it’s not surprising that there’s still some support for Buttigieg, because he was kind of the golden boy back in 2020.”
Another 2020 presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, was the choice of 10% of likely Democratic primary voters, and was tied with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who also ran for the White House in 2020 and came in third in New Hampshire, was at 9% in the new poll, with Sen. Bernie Sanders at 8%. Sanders, the progressive champion and independent senator from Vermont, edged Buttigieg to win the 2020 primary in New Hampshire and was runner-up to Biden in the overall race for the Democratic nomination.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be considered the initial front-runner for the nomination if Biden decided not to seek a second term, polled at just 6%. Harris also ran for the White House in 2020 but suspended her campaign before the start of the primary and caucus calendar.
Progressive firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York grabbed 5% support. Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton polled at 3%, along with 2018 and 2022 Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams. Everyone else on the large list of potential contenders registered at 2% support or less in the poll.
New Hampshire Democratic strategist Lucas Meyer noted that “we wouldn’t be the First in the Nation state if our Democratic voters didn’t have their own opinions about who their nominee might be. But the reality is – and the polling shows this – that all those voters will vote for him as the party’s nominee.”
Meyer, the former New Hampshire Young Democrats president and co-founder and chairman of the progressive group 603 Forward, added that “I do think this poll underpins the administration’s need to communicate its accomplishments better – which is easier said than done in this media environment. There are some seriously widely popular accomplishments that President Biden has accomplished like the largest investment and plan to get safe and clean drinking water to all Americans, record breaking investments in the power grid, electric vehicle chargers, and climate resilience which will drive down our costs, plus President Biden’s first year was the greatest year of job creation in American history, with more than 6 million jobs created.”
The UNH survey from June indicated that 68% of New Hampshire voters didn’t want former President Donald Trump to make another White House run in 2024. But unlike Biden – who only grabbed minority support from his own party, 62% of self-described Republicans did want Trump to seek another term as president.
That same survey made national headlines by indicating that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis edged Trump 39%-37% among likely GOP presidential primary voters in potential 2024 nomination showdown. The survey also indicated Biden topping Trump but DeSantis edging the president in hypothetical 2024 general election matchups.
The latest UNH Survey Center poll was conducted July 21-25, with 1,043 Granite Staters, including 430 likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters, questioned. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points, with a sampling error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points for questions posed to likely Democratic primary voters.
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