The Biden campaign has to know that they are in a bigger pickle than they would like to admit.

Joe Biden simply isn’t popular, period. The polling from this weekend is reflecting that unpleasant reality.

Joe Biden is the least popular commander in chief at this point of his presidency in the last 70 years, below even Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, according to a blistering new poll — imperiling his chances of re-election.

Biden, 81, notched a dismal 38.7% job approval rating for the first quarter of 2024, the venerable Gallup Poll found in a survey released Friday, three points lower than that of the one-term George H.W. Bush at the same point in his presidency.

“With about six months remaining before Election Day, Biden stands in a weaker position than any prior incumbent,” the pollsters concluded.

In contrast, former President Donald Trump, who is vying with Biden for a second White House term, had a 46.8% approval rating at this point in his presidency.

Even Nixon and Carter had higher ratings than Biden, with 53.7% and 47.7%, respectively, and Eisenhower had the highest rating at 73.2%, according to the poll.

The results of Gallup’s presidential approval polls, which the organization has compiled since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower began in 1952, have been strongly predictive of re-election success.

Historically, every incumbent in the past seven decades with an approval rating above 50% has won a second term. Only Barack Obama bucked the trend: his 2012 victory came despite a middling 46% approval six months ahead of that year’s general election.

No first-term president in Gallup’s history has returned to the White House with approval numbers as low as Biden’s — whose results this quarter ranked among the worst of the post-World War II era, in the bottom 12% of all presidential quarters going back to 1945.

Leaving out Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failures in Afghanistan, trying to placate Hamas over Israel, and bending over backwards to coddle Iran, anyone who has gone grocery shopping or put gas in their car lately knows why Biden is deeply unpopular. No one is optimistic about the economy, college campuses are filled with privileged snots who are showing their ignorance and/or racism, and Joe Biden is just ignoring the glaring issues so he can be fluffed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

So, what is his campaign going to do? They’re attempting to make an appeal to Nikki Haley voters. Why now? Well, they’ve been aiming for Haley voters ever since she dropped out of the race, as this ad proves.

But it was Haley’s showing in the swing state of Pennsylvania this week – nearly seven weeks after she had left the race – that is behind this new drive by Team Biden to woo her voters.

Haley had strong showings in other GOP primaries, like in her home state of South Carolina. The former United Nations ambassador also took home primary wins in Vermont and the District of Columbia in March.

But it’s the Pennsylvania numbers that are giving Democrats fresh optimism and causing heartburn for some Republicans given the narrow results that helped hand Trump the presidency in 2016 and took it away four years later. The heart of the 157,000 votes she pulled came in the suburban Philadelphia counties where she won nearly 42,000 votes and hit a high-water mark of 25 percent.

“In a closed state, that is not an insignificant number,” said one Republican strategist, noting that Trump won the state by only 44,000 votes in 2016 before Biden eked it out by 80,000 in 2020. “157,000 in a meaningless primary where everyone knew she had dropped out. You’re talking about razor thin margins in a competitive primary. … You do not have a huge margin for error if even half of those voters become Biden voters.”

David Thomas, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Vice President Al Gore, noted that Biden has an opening because Trump doesn’t seem to be working hard to appeal to moderates.

“I think that the president is trying to reach out to the moderate middle, moderate Republicans and particularly independents,” he said. “That’s the coalition he’s going to need to win if it’s going to be this close selection, which we all know it is. It’s something that yes, he’s doing here, and it’s something that President Trump decidedly will not do.”

Biden reaching out to MODERATES??? That’s a joke, and the last two weeks of watching him avoid the university protests and claiming that there are bad people on both sides is not convincing middle-of-the-road voters that Biden is doing anything but pandering to the far-left base in Michigan.

But about those voters in Pennsylvania. Yes, there were a lot of votes for Nikki Haley that were meaningless. But in every single Democrat primary, where Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee, there are voters picking “uncommitted.” The Biden camp doesn’t seem all that concerned about it, because they are acknowledging that these votes are a token protest within the party. The same is probably likely for the Republican side of the ballot. There is a lot of angst and disappointment that we are basically having a rerun of the 2020 election, and the votes not for the presumptive nominee – on both sides of the aisle – is a reflection of that frustration.

Also, Team Biden is oddly focused in on the 157,000 votes that Haley got. Perhaps they should be more concerned about the votes THEY didn’t get in Pennsylvania.

Uncommitted PA, a coalition of individuals and organizations in the state opposed to Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas, urged Democratic voters prior to Tuesday’s election to write in “uncommitted” to voice their displeasure with the incumbent.

The group celebrated the results of the primary as a “massive write-in victory.”

“Uncommitted PA believes that the outcome of the primary election serves as a strong indicator of voter sentiment in the November election,” the group said in a statement. “Voters in Pennsylvania feel conflicted about voting for Biden, as demonstrated by the write-in and undervote.”

Write-ins and votes for Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) – who suspended his insurgent campaign for the White House earlier this year – totaled nearly 130,000 statewide.

“Biden only won the Commonwealth by 80,000 votes in 2020,” Uncommitted PA noted. “Trump won by just 44,000 in 2016. Both margins of victory are eclipsed by total non-Biden votes in yesterday’s Democratic primary.”

“We have sent a clear message in the key swing state of Pennsylvania: to secure victory in our state in November, Biden must drastically change course in Gaza.”

It’s unclear how many of the write-in votes were for “uncommitted.”

Unlike other states, Pennsylvania doesn’t offer voters an “uncommitted” option on the ballot.

Notice that the “Uncommitted PA” movement is hellbent on pushing Biden to the left on Israel and the war that Hamas started. But the voters who went for Dean Phillips – some 68,000 voters – are obviously not radical pro-Palestine activists, as Phillips himself is not. So if Joe Biden were truly appealing to moderates, why isn’t he picking up the Phillips voters?

Pennsylvania is going to be a close call in November. But the only way that Joe Biden would get Nikki Haley would be to make her his running mate. Remember that Bill Maher already waxed eloquently about this being his “dream ticket“? The only way that happens, though, is to kick Kamala Harris off the ticket. Odds of that happening? Zero, unless the Biden camp is ready for a full-scale intra-party revolt. Haley is still a pro-life Republican, and if her voters are actual Republicans with conservative values, then there is nothing appealing about voting for Joe Biden.

This push to attract Haley voters by reminding them that Donald Trump said mean things is pretty weak tea from Team Biden. They would be much better off appealing to the moderate middle themselves and telling the hard left to take a hike. But they just can’t do it. They are so in thrall to the “youth vote” on these college campuses that they can’t say “boo” to these anti-Semites who are taking over campuses. Biden’s weakness, plus increasing stagflation fears, are his biggest problem right now. And no Haley voter is going to be signing on to that.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click