Biden needs these core voters for the 2024 race

For more politics coverage and analysis, sign up for Here’s the Deal, our weekly politics newsletter, here.

As we hit the six-months-until-the-election window, we’ve been thinking about President Joe Biden’s core base of support.

In the past two PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist polls, there have been standout shifts for some key Biden groups.

As a reminder: It’s easy for polls to be misused. They’re less like maps and more like compasses. They can indicate wide trends and give a sense of bearing.

With that (and margin of error) in mind, here’s what we’re watching.

Suburbanites

Let’s start with a demographic that helped block Hillary Clinton from the White House, but helped Biden win it: suburbanites.

Biden won 54 percent of voters in the ‘burbs in 2020, flipping the group for Democrats from Clinton’s 45 percent.

Now in 2024, there are signs that support from suburban adults is on pause.

In the single month between our March and April polls, Biden saw both his approval rating and favorability ratings among this group drop to less than 50 percent.

A closer look at favorability shows that 52 percent of suburban adults had a favorable impression of Biden in late March. Weeks later, it was just 43 percent. Even considering margins of error, that’s a fast drop.

The margin of error is a range that shows us how close those estimates represent reality, serving as a “guidepost” to help us interpret data and attitudes. Lee Miringoff, who directs the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, discusses these statistical concepts to better the nuance in polling data. Video by PBS NewsHour

Biden is fortunate in that the figures for how people will likely vote if the election were today did not slide by nearly as much. But they did slip. In March, given the choice between Biden, Trump, and independent and green party candidates, 50 percent of suburban registered voters chose Biden. In April, it was 47 percent.

That is not enough to be statistically significant. And Biden still is ahead of Donald Trump with suburban voters when they’re asked who they’d support if the election were today. But it is symbolically significant, inching toward that doomed 45 percent mark that Clinton saw in 2016.

Women

While smaller demographics can have outsized influence, the larger the voting block the more impactful their swings.

This brings us to women, who make up slightly more than 50 percent of the population, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Women have also voted in slightly higher percentages than men in every presidential election since 1980, per the Center for American Women and Politics.

Simply put, they are one of the largest and most powerful voting groups in the country. And Biden won 55 percent of women voters in 2020.

How is he doing now? Biden leads Trump with this group by 9 points in our latest poll. But there are some areas of concern. Let’s look at Democratic women in particular. Biden needs this group to be his most ardent supporters. The crowd doing the wave in the stands. Or at least sitting in the stands.

But the percentage of Democratic women who say they “strongly approve” of how Biden is doing dropped, from 52 percent in March to 43 percent in April. Of course, Biden is generally popular with this group, but we want to point out an apparent loss of enthusiasm from a group Biden needs to be fervent.

Voters of color

Another core group for Biden in 2020: non-white voters.

The Pew Research Center estimated that Black, Hispanic and Asian voters and those of other races accounted for about four-in-10 of Biden’s votes in 2020.

But Pew noted a potential weakness for Biden, writing, “Even as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall.”

Let’s look at how these voters are feeling in our polls.

On favorability, Biden was winning with non-white voters in March. Fifty percent indicated they had a favorable impression of him. By April, that figure had dipped to 45 percent.

That said, 66 percent of people in this group who support Biden said that they are backing the president because they support him, rather than because they oppose Trump.

And they are still planning to vote for him. In our April poll, when asked who among the major party and independent candidates they would support, 47 percent of non-white voters said they are backing Biden, with 34 percent ready to vote for Trump. Eleven percent said they’d vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Four percent were undecided and 2 percent would vote for Jill Stein and Cornel West each.

White voters

One more group we want to look at: white voters. This is not a core constituency for Biden. Democrats routinely lose with white voters overall. But the margin for Biden could make or break him.

In our April poll, when asked if the election were today 48 percent of white voters said they’d support Trump, compared to 38 percent who backed Biden. Eleven percent said they’d vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. To keep the White House, Biden must either raise his numbers with whites overall to be higher than that or he must raise his numbers with non-white voters. (Or there must be a shift in turnout that favors him.)

We spoke with Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher about this last week. He pointed out that Barack Obama won his 2012 race for president overall with 39 percent of white voters backing him. And Biden won in 2020 with 41 percent of white voters.

That is the neighborhood Biden wants to be in by November.

“If Biden is coming anywhere close to 43 percent of white voters, the math doesn’t work for Trump,” Belcher said.