New data produced by John Della Volpe, one of President Joe Biden’s top 2020 campaign pollsters, shows that Democrats might have a messaging problem heading into the 2022 midterm elections.
The Washington Examiner obtained a survey conducted in late June by SocialSphere, Della Volpe’s polling company, for Patients Rights Advocate. It shows that a significantly higher number of respondents are concerned about “crime” (83%) and “immigration” (72%) than “race relations” (67%) or “climate change” (62%).
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Furthermore, “crime” came in as the second-largest area of concern among all issues, just 2 percentage points behind “economy and jobs.”
SocialSphere produced its findings by questioning 2,007 people over the age of 18 between June 23 and June 27, and the survey itself has “a 95% credibility level of +/- 2.4 percentage points.”
Della Volpe also serves as the Harvard Institute of Politics’s polling director, but he took a leave of absence from that post in September 2020 when he began consulting Biden’s campaign.
“While I have remained fiercely non-partisan over my years at the IOP, the critical role Gen Z and Millennials can play in the election, and knowing how important a priority the youth vote is to this election has prompted my decision to re-engage in politics and do my part,” he said at the time.
SocialSphere’s data come as the president’s immigration and refugee policies have drawn fire from critics and a number of major U.S. cities are struggling to battle a wave of violent crimes.
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The Biden administration is attempting to combat the latter with a series of gun violence initiatives, including the launch of “firearm trafficking strike forces” in the Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas.
The president has additionally made a point of distancing himself from some members of his party who are explicitly calling for the defunding of local police forces, but he, and by extension Democrats, are facing even greater vulnerabilities on immigration. Republicans have spent months pointing to Biden’s reversal of the slate of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies as the direct cause of 2021’s historic surge in illegal border crossings.
The Biden administration encountered nearly 190,000 people attempting to cross the southern border in June alone, the highest monthly figure in over two decades.
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It’s also worth noting that Biden’s approval rating fell to 50%, his lowest point since inauguration, on Friday.
