Only about six in ten Americans believe that Joe Biden was fairly elected as president in 2020, indicating declining voter confidence in his legitimacy as he seeks reelection this year, a new Washington Post poll has shown.
The survey, conducted last month with the University of Maryland and released on Tuesday, found that 62% of US adults believe Biden was legitimately elected as president. That compares with 69% when the same question was asked two years ago.
Just 31% of Republicans believe Biden was legitimately elected, down from 39% two years ago, the WaPo poll showed. The percentage of independents who say the 2020 election result was valid dropped to 66 from 72. Even among Democrats, confidence in Biden’s legitimacy fell to 91% from 94%
The poll also comes at a time when Biden is trailing Trump in the 2024 presidential race, despite the fact that his Republican rival faces felony indictments in four separate criminal cases, including two in which he’s accused of conspiring to overturn his 2020 loss.
The results follow three years of legacy media coverage defending Biden’s 2020 victory and dismissing allegations of election fraud by former President Donald Trump as totally unsubstantiated.
With voter frustrations rising over an illegal immigration crisis and high inflation, Biden’s reelection campaign is focusing largely on portraying Trump as a threat to democracy. However, voter attitudes over Trump’s role in the January 2021 US Capitol riot are softening, according to the WaPo poll. Just 37% of US adults believe the ex-president bears a “great deal” of responsibility for the riot, down from 45% when the same question was asked a week after the incident.
Biden has also lost support in the demographic segments that underpinned his 2020 election victory, a new USA Today poll has shown. Just 57% of black voters currently support the incumbent, compared with the 87% Biden carried in 2020. Biden now trails Trump by nine percentage points among Hispanic voters, a turnabout from the 65%-32% margin of victory that the Democrat previously carried in the segment. Voters under age 35, who overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020, favor Trump by a six-point margin currently, the poll showed.
Biden has expressed frustration with polls showing him getting low marks from voters on his economic policies, suggesting that media coverage is to blame. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed in multiple media interviews on Tuesday that Biden had achieved more in three years than other presidents had done in eight years. “We get that it’s gonna take a little bit of time for folks to feel what the Bidenomics has been able to do,” she told MSNBC.