Vesti Nedeli spoke about Joe Biden's serious problems at the start of the presidential race:
“Initially, we were told that we had humanitarian goals in Ukraine. But the steps we're taking in Ukraine speak to America's desire to keep fighting, not end it. If our goal is regime change in Russia, then this is not a humanitarian mission, ”says Robert Kennedy Jr., a candidate for the presidency of the United States.
The voters share the anti-war sentiments of Jr. Kennedy. This presidential candidate is supported by about 20% of Democrats. His support in the party is growing, Biden's is falling. The rating of the owner of the White House again hit the bottom – 37% of Americans approve of his work.
The Insider already wrote about the somewhat strange statement of Kennedy Jr., who clearly believed official Russian sources who spoke of implausibly high losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And the massive support by American voters for his anti-war ideas, apparently, exists only in the imagination of the propagandists from Vesti Nedeli.
USA Today reports that Kennedy's approval rating among Democratic voters as a possible presidential candidate has reached 19%. Vesti Nedeli is trying to compare this result with 37% of Biden's support. But these are data from completely different surveys.
In the first case, voters were asked who they would prefer to see as the Democratic candidate. Biden's result is 62%, but Vesti Nedeli prefers to remain silent about this.
37% is Biden's approval rating as incumbent; polled both supporters of the Democratic Party and its opponents. Such surveys are constantly conducted in the United States by a variety of sociological organizations, and the spread of results is often significant. The American site fivethirtyeight.com brings together the results of various polls and calculates the average rating daily. Biden's lowest rating – 37.5% – was recorded on July 21, 2022. Since then, the level of support for the president has grown and at the beginning of May 2023 amounted to 42.7%.
However, an April Gallup poll did show Biden's approval rating of 37%, but that's the lowest result of any poll; for comparison, the highest is in the YouGov and Rasmussen Reports polls – 47%. So the editors of Vesti Nedeli, in order to create the impression of "breaking through the bottom", had to carefully choose the numbers.
By the way, the rating of President Trump at the beginning of May of the third year of his term was 41.5%. And Biden's minimum result of 37.5% against the background of other presidents does not look like a failure at all, even if you do not compare it with the catastrophic end of the rule of Richard Nixon, who had to resign under the threat of imminent removal from office: Ronald Reagan had an approval rating in 1983 dropped to 35%, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 – up to 34%, George W. Bush in 1992 – up to 29%, Jimmy Carter in 1979 – up to 28%, George W. Bush in 2008 – up to 25%, Harry Truman in 1951-1952 – up to 22%.
As for the unexpectedly high result of a newcomer to big politics, Robert Kennedy Jr., who never ran for either the House of Representatives or the Senate, the membership in the family of John F. Kennedy, the most popular president of all time, apparently played a role here. conducting regular surveys (since the 1940s). The Washington Post writes about his chances:
“How much can this nomination actually undermine Biden? It's probably not worth overestimating the early polls for several reasons.
This week in National Review < American pro-Republican publication. The Insider ran an article suggesting that Kennedy's double-digit numbers could cost Biden dearly. It notes that over the past 50 years, no incumbent president who lost so many votes to a rival in the primaries has been elected to a second term. This is technically true, but it ignores many nuances.
First, we are talking about a small sample size. There have been only three such cases, and they all happened more than 30 years ago: Ronald Reagan's 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford, Ted Kennedy's 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter, and Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to George W. Bush.
But each of these problems in the primaries was more serious than even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s first polls suggested. Reagan received almost half of the vote in the 1976 primary, Ted Kennedy won over a third, and Buchanan received an astonishing 37% of the vote in New Hampshire in 1992 and about a quarter overall. In the first two cases, there was even genuine concern that the incumbent might lose the primaries, and not just lose a somewhat embarrassing number of votes.
The next point is that, in case you haven't noticed, one of these previous main contenders shared the same last name as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The last Kennedy is the nephew of Ted and John F. Kennedy and the son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. There are many reasons to believe that his position in the polls at the start of the campaign is greatly inflated due to his famous name.
A few weeks ago I came across another poll about Kennedy. It was from YouGov and concerned him, as well as a dozen other image politicians. Of the 13 people tested, including Biden, Trump and Congressional leaders, who was the most popular? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Almost half of Americans – 48% – had a positive attitude towards him, and only 28% negatively. Is it because Kennedy is actually so popular? Of course not. It is doubtful that many people really know that much about him. But perhaps there is no goldener name in American politics, especially among left-leaning Americans <…>
That's not to say that losing voters to such a minor figure isn't a headache for Biden, and perhaps some voters might like Kennedy's environmental activism. But the idea that Kennedy will even approach Buchanan's level of support seems unlikely, despite early polls."