You could call Joe Biden’s numbers in the latest CNN poll “rough,” as Phil Mattingly does in this clip. You could also call them “disastrous,” as well as a good example of why Democrats pin their 2024 hopes on a 2020 rematch to turn out their base. Not only has Biden sunk below 40% in overall job approval, but more than two-thirds of the voters in his own party want him off the ticket next year:

A record-low share of Americans say President Biden inspires confidence, while most Democratic voters wish they had an alternative candidate https://t.co/rjt64jV1rv pic.twitter.com/g9d9jUClXO

— CNN (@CNN) September 7, 2023

MATTINGLY: We have brand-new CNN polling this morning, and the numbers are rough for President Biden. It could spell trouble for Democrats and the president’s hopes for reelection in 2024. Still early, but Biden’s approval rating has sunk to 39 percent. Nearly 60 percent of voters think Biden’s policies are making the economy worse. Close to 70 percent of Democrats want somebody else to run for president. And the president’s approval among Democratic voters, that’s slipping.

HARLOW: Now, these are all very troubling for the White House. This new CNN poll shows no clear winner between President Biden and nearly all of the leading Republican presidential candidates in these theoretical matchups, except for Nikki Haley, who leads President Biden by 6 points. Donald Trump, 1 point ahead of Biden.

The poll itself is, if anything, even worse than indicated in this opening. Not only is Biden struggling against all Republican comers, especially Nikki Haley and even Donald Trump, he’s also struggling on a personal basis. When his former boss struggled with low job-approval numbers starting in 2010, at least Barack Obama’s personal polling remained strong.

CNN’s numbers look much different on personal qualities, and look where he’s losing ground now:

Perceptions of Biden personally are also broadly negative, with 58% saying they have an unfavorable impression of him. Fewer than half of Americans, 45%, say that Biden cares about people like them, with only 33% describing him as someone they’re proud to have as president. A smaller share of the public than ever now says that Biden inspires confidence (28%, down 7 percentage points from March) or that he has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president (26%, down 6 points from March), with those declines driven largely by Democrats and independents.

Even the “empathy” claim has lost its luster. In April 2021, Biden got a 57%, but after the craven bug-out from Afghanistan, Biden lost his claim to that quality. It’s not tough to imagine that a few people who still thought of Biden in those terms had second thoughts after watching him flop on the beach in Delaware while Lahaina burned.

But the real damage is inside the Biden coalition. Democrats had already begun abandoning Biden this year, which is why the White House went on a charm offensive with their Bidenomics campaign this summer. Just as previous polls have shown, this has turned into yet another Biden backfire, as consumers grasp the economy much better than other issues and are not buying the Bidenomics spin from Team Biden. That disconnect may explain more than any other factor the 19-point (!) loss in confidence among Democrats over the last six months:

Much of the hesitation revolves around Biden’s vitality rather than his handling of the job. While strong majorities of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters continue to say that Biden cares about people like them (81%) and to approve of his overall job performance (75%), declining shares see him as inspiring confidence (51%, down 19 percentage points since March) or having the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president (49%, down 14 points from March).

The Bidenomics campaign bomb led to this humorous exchange in the clip above between Poppy Harlow and CNN political director David Chalian:

CHALIAN: Only 30 percent of Americans think things are going well in the country. Seven in 10 Americans say they’re going badly. You noted earlier, 58 percent of Americans say that Joe Biden’s policies have worsened economic conditions. That’s a majority there. This is why you hear him talking about Bidenomics all the time and trying to get that number lower.

HARLOW: It makes you think was it right for them to label it Bidenomics.

CHALIAN: Right. He’s got to convince Americans that he’s actually improving the economy. You see a majority thinks he’s worsened it.

Gee … ya think? In a conversation I had with WMAL’s Vince Coglianese this week, I explained that it’s tough to sell a bad economy to voters. It’s easier to sell bad foreign policy, budget policy, and other issues that remain rather distant from voters, but Americans are too intimately connected to the economy to get fooled by happy talk for long. The geniuses on Team Biden apparently thought that voters were stupid enough to fall for it, and they’re discovering that it wasn’t the voters who were stupid after all.

More importantly, Biden’s losses now come from within the party, and in significant enough numbers to matter. Democrat voters have not just lost confidence in Biden, but also any enthusiasm they have for him even as a policy proxy, especially on the economy. That is very very bad news for Democrats, who need a big turnout in 2024 not just for the presidency but all the way down the ballot.

And Question 34 measures just how bad this erosion has become. When asked whether any Republican nominee would be better than Biden or vice-versa, 10% of Democrats say yes — and another 22% say neither of the above. Only 69% of Democrats think Biden is a better choice than any of the GOP’s options. Among independents, that number drops to 25%, with 36% choosing any Republican over the incumbent.

That is why Democrats are pinning their hopes on a 2020 rematch. Biden won’t turn out the base — hell, he’ll barely be able to campaign — but Donald Trump would produce a massive swell of turnout in favor of Biden, or so the theory goes. It certainly explains the avalanche of votes for a barely-campaigning Biden in 2020, and to an extent the bigger-than-expected 2022 Democrat turnout as Republicans nominated Trump-recruited “stop the steal” candidates in key Senate races, all of which the GOP lost.

One has to wonder, though, whether the decline is accelerating so fast that even that strategy could fail. Head-to-head numbers this far out aren’t reliably predictive, but it’s very interesting that Biden can only muster a virtual tie with Trump while his bete noire is presently being turned into a mainstream-media and prosecutorial piñata. That’s also true in terms of favorability, as Trump manages a nearly identical 35/56 rating to Biden’s 35/58 from behind the Protection Racket Media’s circled wagons.

The Trump option is looking like a last, desperate strategy for Democrats. And it might just backfire on them as badly as their Bidenomics PR campaign — or worse.