Is Joe Biden in free fall? 

As bad as polling has been for Joe Biden recently, it just got significantly worse on Thursday.  

In addition to overall polling, two specific polls — one by Rasmussen and one by Bloomberg/Morning Consult — shed new light on what could be an ominous new trend for Democrats. If true and a trend, then there is no light at the end of the tunnel for Biden next November. 

National polls were already bad for the incumbent president. According to Real Clear Politics’s Dec. 14 average of national polls, Biden trailed GOP frontrunner Donalf Trump 44.1 percent to 47.3 percent. He also trailed in twelve of the fourteen polls used to make that average; Biden led in only one — and that by a scant 1 percent — and was tied in the other. On Nov. 14, the same RCP average showed Trump ahead by just 0.8 of a percentage point; on Aug. 14, Biden led by 0.7 of a percentage point. For an average of national polls, these are large changes in a short time.  

The impact of today’s Trump lead is only compounded by the fact that Biden won in 2020’s popular vote by 4.4 percentage points, even as he squeaked out an Electoral College victory by winning six states by less than 3 percent of their popular vote. That effectively means that Biden is actually 7.6 percentage points behind where he needs to be to beat the former president again in 2024. 

So, what specifically made this generally bad news even worse for Biden? 

On Dec. 14, Rasmussen released their poll of likely voters (that is, voters indicating they will be more likely to vote than just registered voter polls). In a head-to-head matchup, Trump led Biden by a staggering 10 percentage points: 48 percent to 38 percent. In Rasmussen’s results on a three-way matchup that included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a configuration that favors Biden by dropping third-party candidates Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who will likely draw more votes from Biden — Trump still led by 8 percentage points: 40 percent to 32 percent, with 16 percent for Kennedy.  

The kicker according to Rasmussen: “This is a reversal of our November survey, when Biden led by four points, with 46% to Trump’s 42%. The new survey also shows stronger support for third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” 

A Dec. 14, Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll takes the bad news to another level of specificity by tracking voters in the six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — that Biden narrowly won in 2020 to secure his Electoral College victory.  

In a head-to-head matchup, Trump led in all six of these states, his narrowest lead being 2 percentage points in Pennsylvania and his largest lead being 6 percentage points in Georgia. In a five-way matchup that includes Kennedy, West and Stein, Trump still leads in all six of these battleground states, with his narrowest lead being 1 percentage point in Pennsylvania and his largest lead being 7 percentage points in Georgia. 

Mind you, Trump does not need to carry all six states to win in 2024; he needs to flip just 35 electoral votes to do so. Pennsylvania and Georgia alone would do it, as well as other combinations that do not require Trump to win Pennsylvania.  

All this bad news raises the specter of an even worse verdict for the president and his party: Is Biden in free-fall? In other words, is a consensus starting to coalesce against Biden that time cannot correct?  

The election is less than 11 months away. These latest polls raise the possibility that momentum is starting to feed on itself and becoming a self-fulfilling verdict on Biden’s presidency. It further raises the question as to what could change such a verdict if it is indeed being shaped.  

It is hard to see an issue out there that could go right for Biden in the coming months that he must not first take responsibility for having made wrong in the first place: foreign policy fiascos; a tepid economy and torrid inflation; excessive spending deficits and debt; an open-border immigration policy; an extremist environmental approach. 

One last look at these latest polls offers one more revelation: Biden is perilously close to 37 percent. Why is 37 percent important? That is the percentage of voters who self-identified as Democrats in his 2020 victory. Today’s polling numbers warn that Biden could be edging closer to retaining only his base. Or, put another way: that Biden has lost the rest of the country.  

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.