Jonathan Bernstein: “Moving from around 37.5% to his current level is a significant change. I’m not quite willing to declare it an iron law of politics, but a 40% approval level is a key marker, with presidents below that level vulnerable to both nomination challenges and third-party candidacies. Below 40%, party actors tend to believe that the president is in big trouble for re-election and that they should consider a different candidate.”
“Why 40%? First of all, there are real costs to attempting to dislodge an incumbent president. Also, political participants tend to be optimists about their own party’s situation. A president at 40% approval is going to have some recent polls out there that are a bit higher, and it’s easy for optimists to cherry-pick those and make excuses for the lower ones…”
“That’s how party actors think. And we’ve seen the results — there were calls in the spring and early summer for Biden to drop out of the 2024 race, but far fewer such comments in the last couple of months.”
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