Kamala Harris confronted with Biden’s brutal poll numbers

Kamala Harris sidestepped a question about Joe Biden’s approval among young voters when confronted with large drops in poll ratings, instead leaning on his record on issues he has sought to appeal to them on.

At the start of the president’s term, some 70 percent of those aged under 30 thought he was doing a good job, CBS News/YouGov polling showed. However, as of early September, this number had slipped to 49 percent.

The same poll found Harris had a vice presidential approval rating of 41 percent, which rose to 55 percent among under 30s. Younger Americans tend to vote Democrat, but Biden, 80, faces ongoing questions about his age as he pursues a second term, as well as independent challenges from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, who could attract some left-wing voters.

The poll was conducted between September 5-8 and surveyed 2,335 U.S. adults, of whom 486 were under 30.

When challenged on their relative unpopularity by CBS News on Sunday, Harris said: “If you poll how young people feel about the climate and the warming of our planet, it polls as one of their top concerns. When we talk about what we’re doing with student loan debt, [it] polls very high.

“The challenge that we have as an administration is we’ve got to let people know who brung [sic] it to them. That’s our challenge, but it is not that the work we are doing is not very, very popular with a lot of people.”

Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment.

A July Washington Post/University of Maryland poll confirmed that for a majority of Americans, climate change is seen as a major problem, if not a crisis.

According to a Pew Research Center survey of 10,329 adults between May 30 and June 4, 50 percent of U.S. adults thought the Biden administration was taking the nation in the wrong direction on climate change, while 45 percent felt it was heading in the right direction. However, the number who supported Biden’s green agenda rose to 64 percent among Democrats aged 18-29 and was even higher among older age brackets.

While Biden has pushed for a green economy through the passing of his Inflation Reduction Act, he has also attracted criticism for approving new oil and gas projects, such as the Willow Project in Alaska. Supportive Democrats said at the time that, during the transition to renewable energy, it would be more environmentally responsible to source oil and gas domestically than to import it.

An Ipsos Mori/USA Today poll of 1,029 American adults, conducted between April 14-16, found 47 percent supported Biden’s student debt relief plan, which rose to 83 percent among the 399 people who held student loan debt.

Biden continued to suspend federal student loan repayments during the coronavirus pandemic as many braced for the economic fallout of the national emergency. He also pledged to forgive some of the 43.6 million borrowers’ debts.

The president had sought to knock at least $10,000 off the debt owed by eligible student borrowers but was blocked by the Supreme Court. The government has since announced it will be discharging $39 billion in debt for 804,000 borrowers through another legal mechanism in a slimmed-down version of Biden’s original plan and has also offered ways to ease the reintroduction of repayments to those struggling.

Following polling which suggested the Biden administration’s support among Black voters was waning, the White House announced Harris would embark on a month-long tour of academic institutions across at least seven states with historically diverse student populations.

In a statement at the time, she described the generation as “critical,” adding: “My message to students is clear: We are counting on you, we need you, you are everything.”