Biden staring down a ‘five-alarm fire’ with minority voters. Can he win back support?

Some Democrats are quietly fretting about President Joe Biden‘s precipitous drop in support among critical voting demographics, and they believe the president must act to solidify his base heading toward the 2024 election.

A Monday poll from USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed Biden slipping with black, Latino, and young voters, three critical legs of his 2020 winning coalition. Though the Biden campaign and White House routinely wave off such polls, multiple Democratic campaign operatives familiar with Biden’s reelection strategy tell the Washington Examiner that the president has real cause for concern.

BIDEN LOSES GROUND WITH YOUNG VOTERS AND MINORITY VOTING GROUPS: POLL

“What we’re seeing now is the beginning of a five-alarm fire,” one Democratic operative explained. “President Biden is underwater on his handling of the economy, and it’s increasingly hard to hide that, even when the alternative is someone like [former President Donald] Trump. Yes, the economy is slowly starting to recover, but people are still under enormous strain. This isn’t the time for platitudes and promises for the future. Voters need to see concrete action, otherwise there’s a real chance he loses this thing.”

“President Biden was incredibly productive during his first three years in office, but he still has yet to deliver fully on promises made on the campaign trail,” a second Democratic strategist added more optimistically. “Voting rights. Wealth equity. Gun violence. Student loan debt. Protecting the climate. These are all issues that disproportionately impact voters of color, but they’re also problems that can’t be solved overnight. President Biden hasn’t forgotten about these topics, but it’s natural that voters will feel anxious, given the uphill battle Biden faces with the MAGA-controlled House.”

Young voters particularly have soured on the president over his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza, something a third veteran Democratic strategist said appeared unlikely to change anytime soon given Biden’s long-held support for Israel.

“President Biden is slowly starting to back away from Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza, but the damage is already done,” that person said. “Unless we get a full split between the administration and the Israeli government over the war, which we both know won’t happen, the president is only going to continue to lose support.”

The president ended 2023 with some of the lowest approval ratings of his time in the White House and trailed former President Donald Trump, the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee, in a rematch, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.

USA Today‘s poll showed Biden earning 63% of black votes, roughly 24 points lower than his performance in the 2020 general election, yet his numbers among Latino voters are even more startling. Biden, who won a majority of Latino votes in 2020, now trails the former president by five points in the demographic.

Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans continue to make inroads with young voters. The former president leads the commander in chief among voters under 35 by two points, according to the USA Today poll.

Still, yet another Democratic campaign operative said that while Biden’s problems should not be taken lightly, the campaign was doing enough to break through with minority communities by November.

“If you look at the 2022 election and 2023’s off-year elections, those were significant wins for Democrats, despite public polling regarding President Biden being where it was,” the operative said. “This coming election isn’t just about President Biden and Donald Trump, this is about abortion rights and the future of immigration. This is about LGBTQ rights and protecting the climate and our children in schools. Voters might not be perfectly happy right now, but come November, the Biden-Harris campaign will make the stakes of the election abundantly clear, and that’s really all they can do.”

The Biden team has been trying to reach out specifically to minority communities in a number of ways, including revisiting effective grassroots organizing efforts, a mainstay of previously successful Democratic campaigns, and spending millions in targeted advertising.

The campaign booked advertisements on Spanish language television and radio stations in markets hosting Republican presidential primary debates last year and will continue those ads throughout 2024, according to campaign officials.

Vice President Kamala Harris is serving as an important surrogate for the president in reaching black, Latino, and young voters. A Democratic campaign strategist previously told the Washington Examiner that Harris is being deployed as a “bridge builder” to shore up support with wings of the Democratic Party that are dissatisfied with Biden.

Toward that end, Harris delivered remarks to the Culinary Workers Union, which is majority Latino, in Nevada on Wednesday and will launch a nationwide abortion rights tour on Jan. 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

Harris also spent the majority of 2023 on a nationwide tour of college campuses, where she touted Biden’s legislative achievements and reiterated the administration’s commitment to matters such as advancing equity and eliminating student loan debt.

Quinton Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2024 campaign, rejected the notion Tuesday that Biden is reshaping his campaign in reaction to his poor polling among minorities.

“The president and the vice president’s trips to South Carolina, they aren’t from a place of worry,” Fulks told reporters on a call previewing Biden’s upcoming trip to Charleston, South Carolina. “They’re a place of practicing what we preach. The president did prioritize putting South Carolina first in the nation in order to involve more people of color in the presidential process, and so we’re doing just that.

“But when it comes to voters of color and if we’re worried, look, our campaign has been putting in the work to do everything we need to do to communicate with communities of color next fall, to make sure that they turn out,” he continued. “We’re not going to wait and parachute into these communities at the last minute and ask them for their vote. We’re going to earn their vote.

“We know that we have to communicate to these constituencies about what this administration has done, we have to communicate with these constituencies about the dangers that the other side poses, and we’re going to do both, but voters of color are the ones who have the most at stake in this election, and we need to make sure that every single one of them understands the choice in front of them,” Fulks said.

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also discounted Biden’s minority polling in Tuesday television interviews.

“In 2020, the president was able to bring together the largest, most historic coalition that we’ve ever seen, that Democrats have ever seen, so obviously we want to continue that,” she said on MSNBC. “We understand that many communities have been left behind. We’re not trying to do the trickle-down economics. We really truly are not. That’s not what the president believes in.”