CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria issued a warning to Democrats regarding President Joe Biden’s chances of beating Donald Trump in the upcoming November election.
Zakaria admitted on his Sunday show that his initial prediction regarding the 2024 election is not “playing out as I thought it would.” The CNN anchor went on to explain that Biden’s unpopularity regarding the economy and the war in Gaza are dividing Democrats, while Trump has united support amongst the GOP due to his criminal indictments.
“Trump is now leading in almost all the swing states. But behind those numbers lie even more troubling details. As someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term, I think it’s best to be honest about reality,” Zakaria noted.
Polls show that Biden has lot support amongst some progressive Democrats due to his support for Israel.
He added, “I understand that polls are not always accurate, but in general, they have tended to underestimate Donald Trump’s support, not overestimated. I doubt that there are many shy Biden voters in the country.”
Zakaria concluded that “trend lines are not working in Biden’s favor” and the president needs to do “something bold” to change it.
Only 33% of Americans said they approved of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which is now opposed both by people who think he is too soft and people who think he
is too hard on Israel. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be uniting behind Trump. Whatever opposition he faced in the primaries has largely melted away, and the trials against him keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base, who sees him as a martyr and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe that his prosecutors are politically motivated. This happens to be true, in my opinion. I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump. A majority of Americans are skeptical that Trump will be able to get a fair trial, according to a CNN poll. And I haven’t even mentioned Robert F Kennedy Junior and Cornel West and Jill Stein, all of whom will probably take votes away from Biden…But trend lines are not working in Biden’s favor. He needs to do something bold and dramatic to seize the initiative on asylum policy, for example, and reverse these numbers. The one that troubles me the most is on the question of who was the more competent. Joe Biden led Donald Trump by nine points in 2020, but Trump now leads by 16 points in January 2024. That 25 point shift could be a reflection of people’s sense that the president’s age is affecting his capacity to govern, and there’s very little that Joe Biden can do now tochange that perception.
Watch the clip above via CNN.