Nearly three-quarters of college Democratic voters say they don’t believe President Joe Biden should run for re-election in 2024, according to an online NBC News/Generation Lab poll of incoming second-year students.
In the poll, 73% of these Democratic students — who attend either two- or four-year institutions — don’t believe Biden should run for president two years from now, while 27% believe he should.
That’s compared with 43% of second-year college Republican voters who say former President Donald Trump should not run for president in 2024, versus 57% who say he should run.
The NBC News/Generation Lab poll of the Class of 2025 — following a look a year ago as these students first entered college — was conducted Aug. 12-17 during a relatively strong stretch of news for Biden.
The Senate passed its climate/health care legislation on Aug. 7; the House passed it on Aug. 12; the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 528,000 jobs were created in July; and scandals, controversies and investigations regarding Trump dominated the political news.
Still, the NBC News/Generation Lab poll finds that just 42% of all incoming second-year college students say they approve of Biden’s job as president, including just 2% who strongly approve, while 57% disapprove of his performance as president.
That’s down from the 58% who approved of Biden’s job when NBC News and Generation Lab checked in with them in 2021, as they were entering their first year of college.
The NBC News/Generation Lab poll was conducted Aug. 12-17 of 1,077 rising college sophomores — from either two- or four-year institutions –and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.3 percentage points.
