Two online focus groups of swing voters in North Carolina caught the attention of Axios and they reported on them. It is not good news for Joe Biden and his bid for re-election. The groups were comprised of 11 North Carolinians. They were a mix of three registered Democrats, one registered Republican, and seven independents.

It should be noted at the top that this is a very small sample of voters, too small for any significance but it does give a general feel of how voters are thinking and talking about current events. Before anyone gets too excited that swing voters think Biden is too old to be president, nine out of the 11 participants said they would vote for Biden in 2024 if he is running against Trump.

All of the participants in the Engagious/Sago focus group were voters who voted for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020. Now there is really nothing Biden can do to knock away their concerns about his fitness for office. They have lost confidence when they watch him fall, as he recently did at the military commencement speech.

By saying they will still vote for Biden if it is a re-do of the Biden-Trump cage match, it tells me that both men are too old to be president (Trump is 77) but Trump is flawed enough that they won’t vote for him. It shows that if Biden went up against a younger, less flawed Republican, that candidate can win in swing states like North Carolina. Remember, they all voted for Trump in 2016 but they could not pull the lever for him in 2020. They are not coming back to him. That squares with what I think, generally speaking, of voters who voted for Trump in 2016 but he lost their support during his time in office. Trump cannot win them back. There is real Trump fatigue out there that cannot be overcome.

Sure, there are a lot of Republican voters who will hold their nose and vote for Trump for a Republican victory but that isn’t a large enough pool of voters to win the general election in 2024. The winning candidate needs independent voters and voters who are willing to cross party lines for the top of the ticket. That is how Trump won in 2016. He shocked the world by winning the Rust Belt voters and working class voters across the country. He won over voters that do not normally vote Republican. It is also how he lost in 2020. He only received Republican votes. He lost suburban women and independents. That’s a sure way to lose an election. Like it or not, they aren’t going to vote for Trump ever again.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow for Trump’s core supporters, I know. He is going to have an even tougher path to victory in 2024 because of the indictments against him. He’ll receive an initial increase in support and then voters will grow tired of the circus again. It’s a shame because his troubles with criminal charges against him in Miami were all self-inflicted. If he had returned whatever the National Archives wanted, none of this would have happened. I do not think he deserves to go to prison over it but Democrats do. They’d like nothing better than to see that. I’m not the only Republican voter who thinks he should not go to prison but what he did was wrong.

Biden’s performances in public are not confidence-building exercises for the swing voters, either. Look at Wednesday’s performances by Biden to prove they are right to be worried. Biden’s brain malfunctioned more than once and he even invented some type of a bridge that will go from the Pacific coast to the Indian Ocean. How he plans to do that, I don’t know. The audience laughed at him several times as he went through his speech. He wasn’t intentionally delivering laugh lines.

Biden's brain malfunctions in real time as the audience laughs out loud pic.twitter.com/9tnX8PkJiS

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 15, 2023

Last night, Biden announced the U.S. “has plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.”

A modern engineering marvel, forever memorialized in the White House transcript.

Of course, that’s completely absurd and it’s not worth exploring. Far more… pic.twitter.com/my0LQaI5Dh

— GOP (@GOP) June 15, 2023

You get the picture. The man has no idea what he is saying and he is now having difficulty with the teleprompters. I believe as others do, as Nikki Haley said, a vote for Biden is a vote for a Harris presidency. All Kamala has to do is wait it out. Then, if Biden wins re-election, the Oval Office will likely be her office soon.

Some swing voters said Trump needs to improve his public speaking but how would he do that? They suggest more press conferences but that isn’t going to happen. He’s 80 years old. He isn’t going to change. Until and if a strong candidate (like Gavin Newsom) jumps in and challenges Biden, the Democrats are stuck with Biden and Kamala. Newsom is running a shadow campaign, ready to step in if something happens to Biden, but he hasn’t shown the fortitude to challenge Biden for his party’s sake.

This is the election know one wants, at least so far. The majority of voters don’t want to pick either candidate. I’ve never quite seen anything like it.