Nearly two-thirds of Democrats said President Joe Biden should step aside and allow the party to select a different nominee, according to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The survey also found that 70% of Americans, including nearly half of Democrats, said they were not confident that Biden had the mental capacity to be president. That is a marked increase since February, when only about one-third of Democrats said they were not confident in his abilities.
Downtrodden Democrats are especially concerned that Biden can no longer win the election. Just 37% of Democrats said they thought he could win, compared with 72% of Republicans who said they thought former President Donald Trump could win.
The new survey, taken from July 11-15, as an increasing number of Democratic lawmakers and donors called for Biden to drop out of the race, demonstrates the growing sentiment among rank-and-file Democrats.
This is not the first survey to find a majority of voters holding this view, but now a sizable majority of voters from the president’s own party are calling for a different nominee.
In early July, just under half of Democrats said Biden should step aside, according to a New York Times/Siena national survey. A survey taken over the following week found a slightly increased share, 56% of Democrats, saying the president should not remain the nominee.
Since Biden’s halting debate performance in June, the president and top officials in his campaign have contended that, while calls for him to step aside have come from party elites, he still has the support of regular everyday Democrats. But increasingly that does not seem to be borne out in polling data.
Among Democrats, majorities of younger and older voters said Biden should drop out, according to the AP-NORC poll. In fact, Black Democrats are among the only demographic group within the party where a majority of voters do not say the president should step aside. Black Democrats were split about evenly on whether Biden should drop out of the race.
At the same time, just one-quarter of Republicans said Trump should withdraw from the race.
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