George Stephanopoulos used to be President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, and he has toed the liberal line for Democrats ever since as an ABC News anchor.
So for Stephanopoulos to call out President Joe Biden over his ever-dwindling poll numbers means something.
“This poll is just brutal for President Biden,” Stephanopoulos said Sunday on “This Week.”
The poll by ABC News and The Washington Post released Sunday found that 63% of Americans do not think Biden, 80, has the “mental sharpness” to be president. That’s up nine points since the same question was asked a year ago.
Just 32% believe Biden is mentally capable, while 5% have no opinion.
The numbers were similar on Biden’s physical health. Some 62% of Americans don’t think Biden is in “good enough physical health” to serve as president, while just 33% believe he is.
Former President Donald Trump fared much better in the poll, taken from April 28 to May 3. 54% of those surveyed said Trump has the mental sharpness compared to Biden’s 32%. And 64% said he’s physically fit enough to be president, compared to Biden’s 33%.
Biden’s approval rating is also in the dumper, hitting a new low of 36%, down six points since the same poll was conducted in February. More than half (56%) disapprove of the job Biden’s doing.
A majority (54%) of those surveyed said Trump did a better job with the economy than Biden. Just 36% think Biden is doing a better job.
Plus, the poll showed Trump would beat Biden by 7 points in a head-to-head matchup.
“You’re seeing real weaknesses in the coalition that powered Joe Biden to the presidency in 2020,” ABC’s political director Rick Klein told Stephanopoulos, Fox News reported. “This race is shaping up [to be] a lot more about the incumbent president Joe Biden than it is about any of his challengers.”
Donna Brazile, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, also appeared on “This Week” and said the poll should alarm Democrats.
“It kept me up, and I thought they should wake up and look at those numbers,” Brazile said. “It’s sobering in the sense that the coalition that elected Joe Biden, with the historic numbers that we saw in 2020, that coalition right now is fragmented. That should concern them,” she said.
The latest survey was just another in a string of bad polls. Shortly after Biden announced his re-election campaign two weeks ago — not with a live event featuring thousands of cheering supporters but with a video posted on his website — his job approval rating among the U.S. public slipped to 37%, Gallup reported.
That’s just slightly more than 1 in 3 people — not a winning number. In the 2020 election, Biden won 51.3% of the vote, so that’s a 14.3% drop in support.
For the record, 37% is the lowest Gallup has measured for him to date. The president’s job approval has been hovering in the low 40s for most of the last 18 months, after the initial honeymoon period. But he did drop to 38% last July, then his lowest.
The latest Gallup poll, taken April 3-25, shows a 3-point dip from March and a 5-point drop from February. His ninth quarter average in polling is 39.7%.
“Only Ronald Reagan in early 1983 had a lower ninth-quarter average among elected post-World War II presidents,” the pollsters wrote. “Reagan’s low ratings came during a period when the unemployment rate exceeded 10% after the 1981-1982 economic recession.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.