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Nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw, new AP-NORC poll finds
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him.
The new survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, conducted as Biden works to salvage his candidacy two weeks after his debate flop, also found that only about 3 in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president, down slightly from 40% in an AP-NORC poll in February.
The findings underscore the challenges the 81-year-old president faces as he tries to silence calls from within his own party to leave the race and tries to convince Democrats that he’s the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. The poll was conducted mostly before Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. It’s unclear whether the shooting influenced people’s views of Biden, but the small number of poll interviews completed after the shooting provided no early indication that his prospects improved.
Meanwhile, as Vice President Kamala Harris receives additional scrutiny amid the talk about whether Biden should bow out, the poll found that her favorability rating is similar to his — but the share of Americans who have an unfavorable opinion of her is slightly lower.
The poll provides some evidence that Black Democrats are among Biden’s strongest supporters, with roughly half in the survey saying he should continue running, compared to about 3 in 10 white and Hispanic Democrats. Overall, seven in 10 Americans think Biden should drop out, with Democrats only slightly less likely than Republicans and independents to say that he should make way for a new nominee.
“I do have genuine concerns about his ability to hold the office,” said Democrat Andrew Holcomb, 27, of Denver. “I think he’s frankly just too old for the job.”
AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports a new poll sharply undercuts President Biden’s claim that ‘average Democrats’ are still with him after his debate debacle.
Janie Stapleton, a 50-year-old lifelong Democrat from Walls, Mississippi, held the opposite view, saying Biden is the “best candidate” for president.
People aren’t just sour on Biden on as they size up their choices this election season.
What to know about the 2024 Election
About 6 in 10 Americans want Trump to withdraw — but relatively few Republicans are in that camp.
As for Biden, younger Democrats are especially likely to want to see him bow out – and to say they’re dissatisfied with him. Three-quarters of Democrats under the age of 45 want Biden to drop out, compared to about 6 in 10 of those who are older.
“I just feel like these two individuals are a sad choice,” said Alexi Mitchell, 35, a civil servant who lives in Virginia. She identifies as a Democratic-leaning independent, and while she thinks Biden is probably still mentally up to the job, she worries that the past few weeks’ unraveling of support makes him a weak candidate, no matter what happens next. “If he doesn’t have control over his own party, that’s a fatal flaw,” she said. “He’s put us in a bad position where Trump might win.”
Despite bullish talk from the Biden campaign heading into the debate, the faceoff only left the president in a deeper hole. Democrats are slightly more likely to say they’re dissatisfied with Biden as their nominee now than they were before his halting performance. About half are dissatisfied, an uptick from about 4 in 10 in an AP-NORC poll from June.
By contrast, most Republicans – about 6 in 10 – came out of the debate very or somewhat satisfied with Trump as their candidate. Too few interviews were conducted after the assassination attempt to provide a clear indication of whether Republicans or Americans overall have rallied further around Trump since then.
David Parrott, a Democrat from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, was willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt given the president’s age, but he still voiced concerns about a potential second term.
“I don’t know if he can make it another four years or not,” said Parrott, a 58-year-old retiree. “Shouldn’t he be sitting at his beach house taking it easy?”
All of the recent churn has left Americans much more likely to think Trump is capable of winning the 2024 election than is Biden – 42% to 18%. About a quarter thought the the two men equally capable of winning.
Even Democrats are relatively dour about their party’s prospects come November.
Only about a third of Democrats believe Biden is more capable of winning than is Trump. About 3 in 10 think the two are equally capable of winning and 16% say victory is more likely to go to the Republican. By contrast, Republicans are overwhelmingly convinced that Trump is in the best position to win.
Trump also has the edge on Biden when Americans consider who is most capable of handling a crisis, 38% to 28%. And people are about equally divided on which candidate has the better vision for the country, with 35% saying Biden and 34% Trump.
For all of the disenchantment Biden is up against, the president insists it’s not too late to turn things around, saying past presidents have come back from a deficit at this stage in the campaign. In an interview Tuesday with BET News, he said many voters haven’t focused yet, adding, “The point is, we’re just getting down to gametime right now.”
The poll did also offer a bright spot for Biden: 40% of adults say he’s more honest than Trump, while about 2 in 10 think the opposite.
Most Democrats — around 6 in 10 — say that Vice President Harris would make a good president, while 22% think not and 2 in 10 don’t know enough to say. The poll showed that 43% of U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of her, while 48% have an unfavorable opinion. Somewhat more have a negative view of Biden: approximately 6 in 10 Americans.
The survey was conducted before Trump selected freshman Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. It showed that for most Americans, Vance is still an unknown. Six in 10 don’t know enough about him to form an opinion, while 17% have a favorable view and 22% view him negatively.
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The poll of 1,253 adults was conducted July 11-15, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
American citizens arrive onshore after being evacuated from the M/V Hondius in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Seventeen U.S. cruise passengers are expected to return stateside early Monday, after weeks aboard the M/V Hondius, the cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak.
The Americans are disembarking the cruise in the Canary Islands and boarding a medical repatriation flight, arranged by the U.S. government, bound for Nebraska. After landing at the Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, they’ll head to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) for an initial evaluation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“For the passengers getting off the ship, I’d say, ‘Welcome to Nebraska.’ You are coming to the premier facility in the United States, if not the world, to take care of you,” says Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at UNMC.
The 17 U.S. passengers are among the total of nearly 150 people who were on the ship from 23 different countries. They’ve endured in the midst of a hantavirus outbreak which has caused at least eight cases, including three deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
The returning Americans had been isolating in their cruise cabins. They will now be monitored for several more weeks, U.S. health officials said in a media call on Saturday.
The passengers are arriving at America’s only federally funded quarantine unit, which also received cruise passengers from a different outbreak — the Diamond Princess Cruise, in early 2020 — which was one of the first known superspreading events of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike COVID, which was a novel pathogenic strain when it emerged, scientists have been studying hantaviruses — and specifically the Andes variant which caused this outbreak — for decades. “We do know that you can get small clusters of disease, but in 30 years we’ve never seen any large outbreaks,” says Khan, “so this is unlikely to become a pandemic.”
This strain of hantavirus can be deadly, but it isn’t very contagious between people. It tends to take prolonged, close contact with someone who’s showing symptoms.
So far, all of the U.S. passengers are well. But symptoms can take up to 42 days after exposure to show up, according to the CDC.
“It’s appropriate to be cautious,” Khan says, “To monitor these people for 42 days [to make sure] they don’t get sick. And if they do get sick during those 42 days, to make sure to put them into isolation.”
Health officials said the U.S. passengers would not be officially quarantined. Instead, they suggested that after an initial assessment in Nebraska, some could continue monitoring at home, with daily check-ins from their health departments.
Seven U.S. passengers who had left the cruise ship earlier are being monitored in several states, including Texas, California, Georgia and Virginia.
Public health experts have been raising alarms over what they consider to be a muted public response by the U.S. government to this outbreak.
Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says the U.S. response has been fragmented, disjointed, and delayed for weeks, but it’s finally coming together. “The CDC was missing in action for quite a long time,” he says. “Better late than never — but it is very late.”
In response to a request for comment from NPR, Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services: “These claims are completely inaccurate. The U.S. government is conducting a coordinated, interagency response led by the Department of State. HHS, through ASPR [Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response] and CDC, is supporting efforts to protect the health and safety of U.S. citizens, including repatriation, medical evaluation, and public health guidance.”
She further described CDC’s response activities, including setting up its Emergency Operations Center, deploying teams to the Canary Islands and Nebraska, and notifying state health departments of returning U.S. travelers.
Many of these activities have come recently, and Gostin agrees that the U.S. government is now taking active measures to ensure that the passengers, their families, and the communities they’re returning to are safe.
But health officials got lucky this time: the Andes virus is not very contagious, and health officials say this outbreak will likely be contained. The way the U.S. has handled this episode shows glaring gaps in its pandemic preparedness, Gostin says: “If this was a highly transmissible virus, you could imagine what chaos we would be facing now.”
Gostin says more investment is needed in infectious disease prevention, containment and control.
Pope Leo XIV’s moral voice has resounded in global politics during the first year of his papacy, on war, immigration and artificial intelligence.
But in quieter, more personal ways, the first pope from the United States has also been shaping the future of the Roman Catholic Church in his home country — one bishop at a time.
So far, Leo has made roughly 30 announcements involving new bishops, elevated bishops or retiring bishops in the United States, offering an early look at what the American church hierarchy will become under his leadership.
He appears to be naming bishops not primarily as political statements, but rather as leaders who, like him, have focused on pastoral care and local management, and who reflect the changing composition of Catholic pews and priests.
Last week, Leo appointed Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to be the next bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, the diocese that covers West Virginia. The first Salvadoran bishop in the United States, Bishop Menjivar-Ayala became a citizen 20 years ago after a period as an undocumented immigrant, an experience that resonates with many Catholic families in the country.
In his own story, Bishop Menjivar-Ayala sees the story of Leo, who as a young priest moved to Peru from the United States to be a missionary and then became both a bishop and a citizen of his new country. Leo’s appointments have a global perspective, he said.
“Those decisions are not taken from political points of view, but what are the needs of that community?” he said. “Jesus said if you want to be great, you should become the servant of all.”
The same day Bishop Menjivar-Ayala was appointed, Leo also named Father John Gomez, a Colombian-born priest who became a U.S. citizen five years ago, to lead the Diocese of Laredo on Texas’ border with Mexico.
Father Gomez, currently the vicar general of the Diocese of Tyler in East Texas, felt a call to ministry after completing his military service in Colombia. He went to seminary in Miami and continued his theological studies in Texas and Rome. In Tyler, nearly half of Catholics are Spanish speakers, he said.
“That was the reason I came to the United States, to serve the growing Spanish-speaking population in the Catholic Church,” he said.
“Now I am a bilingual, bicultural man, and I love to serve both communities,” he said. “But there is a great need for us here in the church, for priests.”
Many of the most prominent U.S. cardinals and archbishops are reaching retirement age, meaning Leo will have an opportunity to make personnel changes at the highest levels. Bishops are required to offer the pope their resignation at age 75, but the pope can choose whether to accept it for five years.
In Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich turned 77 in March, and in Newark, Cardinal Joseph Tobin turned 74 last week. Archbishops in Las Vegas, Miami and Santa Fe are all turning 76 this year.
Before Leo was elected pope, he ran the influential Vatican office responsible for choosing bishops. That expertise has allowed him to move quickly, and his relative youth means that he could significantly remake a generation of the church hierarchy, similar to the legacy of Pope John Paul II, said Christopher White, a senior fellow of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University.
In December, Leo replaced Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who turned 75 shortly before Francis died, and appointed Archbishop Ronald Hicks, 58, who also had a similar biography to Leo’s, with shared ministry experience and administrative skills.
A notable number of Leo’s new bishops, like many American priests and parishioners, were born in other countries.
Last June, Leo appointed Bishop Simon Peter Engurait, who was born in Uganda in 1971, the seventh of 14 children, to the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux in Louisiana.
About a third of priests in his diocese are foreign-born, many with green cards and some with religious worker visas, Bishop Engurait said.
“Back in the day, you had bishops from, for example, Ireland, because that is where most of the priests came from,” he said. Now, as more and more priests come from Latin America and Africa, the makeup of the bishops is also changing.
One of his hopes is to integrate the range of diverse Catholic communities in his diocese, which includes many African Americans and a significant Hispanic and South Asian population, though very few Africans, he noted.
Recently, Hispanic Catholics had a celebration of the Virgin Mary, including traditions from places like Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and he wished other immigrant cultures in the dioceses were represented to share their own flavors of Catholicism, he said.
Leo’s focus on the universality of the church is a central gift for parishes, he noted.
“I personally believe that God gives us leaders for a time, for a season,” he said, adding that Leo has “a beautiful recognition and appreciation of the global human family.”
Shortly after his own installation mass, Bishop Engurait traveled to participate in the installation of another Leo-appointed bishop in his cohort, Bishop Pedro Bismarck Chau, an auxiliary in Newark who was born in Nicaragua and became a U.S. citizen in seminary.
Leo is continuing a trend that Pope Francis started, elevating priests who have what Francis called “the smell of the sheep,” Bishop Chau said.
Many in Leo’s cohort of new bishops came up as parish priests, meaning they have extensive on-the-ground pastoral experience as opposed to having primarily worked in diocesan offices or adjacent ministries, he noted.
In September, Bishop Chau will go with fellow newly appointed bishops to Rome for what they jokingly call “Baby Bishop School,” an annual Vatican program for that year’s bishop class, and meet Leo for the first time. His own appointment process began while Francis was still alive and Leo, then Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, was still in his former role leading the bishops’ office.
“He saw my paperwork, he brought that paperwork to Pope Francis, that’s the interesting part of it,” Bishop Chau said. “I can’t wait to talk to him about it.”
Iran is “trying to choke off the entire world’s economy” as the regime escalates attacks on global shipping and infrastructure, according to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, who declared Sunday that Tehran has “shown its true colors.”
Waltz spoke to “Fox News Sunday,” accusing Iran of aggressively targeting international waterways and threatening critical global systems to gain leverage in its nuclear standoff.
“We cannot and the world should not tolerate an Iranian regime that is trying to choke off the entire world’s economy, hold everyone hostage because of a dispute over its nuclear program,” Waltz said.
He warned that Iran’s actions go beyond conventional military posturing, pointing to reports of sea mines being deployed and attacks on commercial shipping routes.
“It cannot start just throwing sea mines indiscriminately out into the ocean, attacking shipping,” he said.
Waltz also raised alarms about new threats discussed on Iranian state television, including potential attacks on undersea infrastructure.
“They’ve even now started talking about… taking the undersea cables that move financial data, cloud information and all kinds of important economic information in and out of the gulf,” he said.
Waltz said Iran’s recent actions have shifted perceptions in the region, pointing to growing international alignment against Tehran, including stronger cooperation among Gulf nations and Israel.
“Iran has now showed its true colors,” he said.
Despite the rising tensions, Waltz said President Donald Trump is still pursuing a diplomatic path, one that he noted is backed by military strength.
“President Trump has been clear. They will never have a nuclear weapon, and they cannot hold the world’s economies hostage,” Waltz said.
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