Opinion's latest focus group aims to understand why some are on the fence in advance of 2024.
I think it's safe to say that many New York Times readers either (a) voted for President Biden in 2020 and/or (b) have strong opinions about the man, his leadership, his administration and his record. As Biden was preparing to announce his re-election campaign this spring, I spoke with colleagues about devoting one of our Times Opinion focus groups to exploring a conundrum that comes up in conversations with a lot of Biden supporters: They think the president is a good and decent person, and they generally like his policies — but they don't necessarily want him to run for re-election, and they are not sure he's up to the job for another four years. |
So: Is it the age thing? (Biden, as you've probably heard umpteen times, would be 86 at the end of a second term.) Is it something else in the personal realm, or is it more about policy? Who do they think could be better than Biden AND could win? Are people really torn between Biden and, say, the current Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump? |
Perhaps the ambivalence boils down to an innate desire within many curious, opinionated voters to kick the tires, so to speak — to be skeptical of the president they have, or at least to hunger for alternatives and want to spend a little time musing about other options? |
But these are just theories, so we decided to gather a group of Biden 2020 voters who said they were leaning toward or against him or hadn't decided what to do in 2024. We worked with one of our professional focus group moderators, Kristen Soltis Anderson, to lead a discussion with so-called skeptical Biden voters; we recruited 14 people and 11 ultimately attended the Zoom discussion. |
We tried to come up with some inventive questions — What kind of animal best represents Joe Biden? — to go along with the straight-ahead ones, and drill down the nature and intent behind people's answers. The conversation took so many turns that Soltis Anderson DM'd me at one point and suggested, smartly, that we zero in on reconciling the criticism of Biden with how people vote — and indeed, many in the group acknowledged in the end that they probably would vote for him again (especially if the alternative was Trump). |
Still, there were troubling signs for Biden. None of our participants saw him as a strong leader or as a president who shared their values. No one really brought up managing Covid or restoring a sense of normalcy in the country, even though many Biden advisers said early on that the administration would be judged by how he handled those things. |
As with all of our focus groups, the goal was to explore the opinions of regular Americans and to better understand the differences that strain our society and democracy, but also the bonds and interests that bring us together. Not everyone is going to support or vote for Biden, by any means (and we've talked to some people who didn't, and won't, in other focus groups), but understanding the opinions driving some Biden voters helps us understand some of the aspirations and anxieties currently shaping our country. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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