Why Is Biden's Approval Rating Sinking?
The past three months have not been kind to the 46th president
Democrats are in distress. Over the past three months, Joe Biden’s approval rating has plummeted. According FiveThirtyEight.com’s aggregation of polls (see below) Biden’s numbers—which had held steady for the first six months of his presidency—began falling near the end of July. Near the end of August his approval rating went underwater. His numbers stabilized for a few weeks mid-September before eroding further. Today, approximately 51% of the country disapproves of the job he’s doing as president, with only 43% approving. That’s almost exactly opposite of where he stood at the beginning of August and significantly worse than his standing this past spring.
Furthermore, a Grinnell College National Poll conducted by pollster Ann Selzer that was released last week found 50% of Americans disapproving of the job Biden was doing as president with only 37% approving. Multiple polls, including the Pew Research poll below, indicate Biden’s approval numbers are down with every group, including women, young Americans, college graduates, Blacks, Latinos, and Democrats.
Selzer found independents in particular have flipped on Biden: Exit polls indicated Biden won that group 54% to 41% in 2020, but would now support Trump over Biden by a score of 45% to 23%.
Most presidents historically take office with a certain amount of goodwill from the public only to see their numbers drop over the course of their first year. I don’t want to make too much of comparisons to past presidents, though, as I think today’s high degree of partisan political polarization has significantly changed the way citizens assess the president. I also don’t want to assume a president somehow can’t rebound from sagging poll numbers; in fact, if the pandemic ends, the economy recovers, Democrats put some legislative victories on the board, and the public gets wise to Trump and the Republicans, it isn’t hard to imagine Biden’s numbers soaring.
But Democrats have good reason to be alarmed. Yes, despite the 24-hour viral news cycle and the occasional event that demands an immediate reaction, politics is a long game, and those who practice it need to be able to weather the bumps in the road lest they do something in the short term that damages them in the long term. Yet Biden and the Democrats can’t let his standing with the public slip much further. It’s not just that the party’s fate is closely tied to Biden’s numbers, meaning their odds of holding onto Congress (already low) depend on his popularity. It’s that given the likely alternative, the fate of American democracy is wrapped up in Biden’s success as president. In fact, according to Selzer, if the 2024 election was held today, Biden and Trump would be tied.
So it’s worth trying to figure out why Biden’s approval rating has fallen and what he and the Democrats could do to boost it. What follows is an analysis of various reasons that might explain the decline.
The situation at the southern border—The border is a thorny issue for Biden. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a few days ago that a record 1.7 million migrants were caught in the past year entering the United States illegally. In September, the administration was criticized by Republicans for allowing thousands of Haitian migrants to set up an encampment beneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Democrats—including Biden himself—then criticized the Border Patrol agents who chased the migrants on horseback as the migrants brought food to their families from Mexico. (Since then, the encampment has been cleared.) While the Biden administration has technically kept the border closed due to COVID, some migrants—including many children—have gained lawful entry to the country, although human rights groups have raised concerns about the living conditions of migrant children in U.S. custody.
Disapproval of Biden’s handling of the border cuts both ways. Republicans have accused Biden of failing to secure the border and adopting an outlook toward immigration that only encourages more migrants to travel to the United States. Some Democrats claim Biden has not adequately adjusted the inhumane immigration policies Trump put in place during his presidency. The persuadable independent voters Biden needs on his side look at the border and see a sieve (According to a survey conducted by Joel Benenson and Neil Newhouse, independents cite “immigration and border security” as the second-most important issue facing the country, immediately after “economy/inflation/jobs.”) The pro-immigration activists that form a key component of Biden’s base are distressed he hasn’t done more to help those looking for a better life in this country. Overall, according to Selzer, only 27% of Americans approve of the way Biden is handling immigration while 58% disapprove. It’s a problem with no politically viable solution in sight. Consequently, whenever the border makes it into the news, it’s a bad day for Biden’s poll numbers.
The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan—Biden’s numbers fell steadily throughout August, which was when a massive, weeks-long, and hastily arranged international airlift evacuated approximately 122,000 people from Kabul’s airport following the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan. This event dominated the news for much of the month and resulted in the deaths of twelve American servicemembers. It was a humiliating moment for the United States, and while the American public supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Biden drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for his handling of the withdrawal and its aftermath.
The withdrawal certainly factored into Americans’ appraisal of Biden in August. Once events in Afghanistan quit driving news cycles, however, one may have expected Biden’s numbers to rebound somewhat. They did not. Yet it’s unlikely the American public is still fuming over Afghanistan. Instead, it is more likely the month-long debacle in Afghanistan marked the moment many Americans quit giving Biden the benefit of the doubt concerning his management of public affairs. Prior to August, Biden was seen as a president managing problems he inherited from the previous administration. The fall of Afghanistan, however, was regarded as a crisis of Biden’s own making, thus inviting Americans to cast a more critical eye on his leadership. While the fall of Afghanistan may no longer weigh heavily on the minds of Americans, it did change their perspective on Biden’s presidency and raised questions about his competency. That frame has been a drag on Biden’s numbers ever since.
The Delta surge and pandemic fatigue—A closer look at Biden’s approval rating, however, shows the president’s numbers began sinking prior to the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan in early August, suggesting some sort of discontent was already brewing before those events took place. A good contender for the source of that discontent is the pandemic. By August 1 (and despite the widespread availability of vaccines) the Delta outbreak had produced the pandemic’s second biggest surge in cases (see below; from the New York Times).
While most of those cases were confined to Florida, Texas, and other southern states, rising trendlines in nearly every state suggested the rest of the country would not be spared a fifth wave. By September 1, Delta had resulted in the pandemic’s second biggest surge in hospitalizations, and near the end of that month, it had almost matched the number of deaths recorded at the peak of the first wave back in April 2020 (see below; from the New York Times).
Things looked good on the pandemic front at the beginning of July, when Biden declared “independence” from the virus. Delta had other plans for us. Mask mandates were re-imposed; in some cases, they were forbidden. With the country stuck at a 70% vaccination rate, fears of a persistent outbreak led some municipalities and businesses to impose vaccine mandates or require proof of vaccination for entry. Breakthrough cases began to garner attention as public health officials seemed divided over the merits of booster shots. Schools reopened without any clear sign of when elementary-aged children would become eligible to get a vaccine. Hospital systems in hard-hit states were pushed to the brink.
I assume people could be upset with Biden for doing too much or too little when it comes to the Delta wave of the pandemic. It isn’t exactly fair to blame him for the emergence of a highly infectious variant or the recalcitrant behavior of Republican governors, especially when Biden has always been an advocate for vaccines as the way out of this pandemic. But rightly or wrongly, a lot of people base their assessment of the president on whether or not they feel the country is headed in the right direction, and if people view the pandemic as the country’s most pressing public problem and they see a president at the mercy of a pandemic he was elected to end, and if those same people are for whatever reason just sick and tired of having to live with a pandemic day in and day out, then it is understandable why some people would sour on his presidency.
Along these lines, the good news for Biden is if case numbers decline, then his approval rating should presumably somewhat recover. The bad news is we’re heading into winter when a sixth wave wouldn’t be unexpected. Beyond that, though, Biden may not get the credit he hoped to earn for ending the pandemic if COVID becomes endemic or just slowly burns itself out over the course of 2022 while the country returns to something resembling normal. Such an anticlimactic conclusion to one of the most disruptive events of our lifetimes—and one that is easy for people to causally remove from the miracle of the vaccine—wouldn’t provide Biden with much of a boost.
Inflation and the pandemic economy—The problem with linking Biden’s low approval rating to the recent rise in COVID cases is that his approval rating should presumably improve as case levels decline. Yet that hasn’t been the case so far, even after a month-long drop in cases. Granted, the seven-day average of cases is still barely higher than at any other time outside last winter’s holiday surge, so maybe cases still have to come down a bit more for that to register with people.
My gut tells me, however, that the American people have mostly moved on from the pandemic emergency and learned to live with the medical reality of it even as we still argue over mask and vaccine mandates. In other words, for most Americans, this isn’t a public health crisis anymore. Instead, the pandemic has largely become an economic problem. The main issue seems to be inflation, which has been driven by a shortage of workers (many of whom have shuffled jobs or are holding out for higher wages) clogged supply chains, difficulty importing parts and goods from overseas, and consumers with a year and a half’s worth of wages, stimulus checks, and tax refunds burning holes in their pockets. Cars, gas, hotels, airfare, electronics, books, toys, groceries, rent, you name it: All of it’s gotten more expensive over the past year, and according to a recent Pew Research poll, about 90% of Americans identify this as a problem (see below).
It seems most economists think this is primarily a logistical issue that will eventually work itself out, although it may be a bumpy ride until supply and demand finally stabilize. Lately, though, corporate America has been indicating they expect inflation is here to stay, as it will take years for supply chains and the employment base to recover.
How much of this is Biden’s fault? It’s hard to blame the president for the wild economic swings attendant to a pandemic, but Americans (again, rightly or wrongly) often base their evaluations of the president on the state of the economy and they expect a president to be responsive to those concerns. In fact, according to a recent Morning Consult poll, many of them already blame Biden’s policies for exacerbating inflation. If Americans feel squeezed by rising prices or a shortage of the goods they’re looking to buy, it’s likely they will take it out on Biden.
To his credit, Biden has taken some steps to get the economy back to normal, most notably by trying to relieve the backlog at the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach and by simply getting as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible (although, ironically, the speed at which his administration accomplished that may have exacerbated the economic problem from the demand side.) In the short term, however, his administration has to be concerned about the Christmas season and whether consumers will not only be able to afford to buy the goods they want, but whether those goods are even going to be on the shelf. (Big box retailers like Target and Walmat have signaled they will be.) There’s also the possibility Americans are already aware of this problem and are going to start buying goods earlier, which will only compound the problem of a shortage of goods and higher prices as Christmas nears.
The stalled Democratic agenda, Pt. 1: Everything that can’t be passed through reconciliation—A $15 minimum wage. The DREAM Act. Criminal justice reform. DC statehood. A voting rights bill. Those are just some of the issues Democrats campaigned on that they can’t include in the reconciliation bill because they are not directly related to the budget or taxation. That means in order for these ideas to become law, Senate Democrats would first need to scrap the filibuster and then get all fifty of their senators behind the bills, which is about as likely as the Dodgers winning the World Series this year (although voting rights legislation has an outside shot of getting enacted that way.)
Failure to make headway on these issues threatens to disillusion portions of the Democratic base, and there’s evidence to suggest young, Latino, and Black voters have grown dejected with Biden’s lack of progress in these areas. Consider this article from the Washington Post by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. about Black male voters in the Atlanta area:
W. Mondale Robinson spent a large chunk of last fall in clubs and bars and concert venues in Georgia, trying to convince disenchanted Black men that casting a ballot — in the 2020 general election, then the Georgia runoffs for the U.S. Senate — could finally mean real change in their communities.
But Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, thinks the case would be a lot harder to make now. He remembers the exact moment his optimism that President Biden would be different began to fade: when Democrats in May said they were willing to significantly weaken a policing-reform bill to get Republican support.
More disappointments followed. Robinson was dismayed that Biden did not push for changes to the filibuster to enact a $15 minimum wage. He was upset that the president did not try to halt a raft of voting restrictions passed by Georgia’s GOP-led legislature.
“I think the frustration is at an all-time high, and Biden can’t go to Georgia or any other Black state in the South and say, ‘This is what we delivered in 2021,’ ” said Robinson, whose group believes it reached 1.2 million Black men in Georgia. “Black men are pissed off about the nothingness that has happened. . . . Does it make the work harder? It makes the work damn near impossible.”
What’s interesting about this is that for all the talk about how Democrats are sliding too far to the left and how they need to do more to appeal to the median voter, they really haven’t even started to address their party’s priorities. Furthermore, the recon-ciliation bill that may be finalized within a matter of hours looks to be significantly scaled back in scope, which is sure to disappoint Democrats even more. The good news for Biden is that these voters are the easiest to win back since they are part of his natural constituency. If he doesn’t deliver for them or find some way to engage them, however, they may sit out the midterms or even the 2024 election, which would be devastating in the face of Republican enthusiasm.
The stalled Democratic agenda, Pt. 2: The gridlocked reconciliation package—So this is a weird one. This past summer, a bipartisan group of senators negotiated and the Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that was then held up in the House until the Senate agreed to pass a reconciliation package containing new social spending and climate change legislation. That reconciliation package is currently in a state of limbo as a group of moderate Democratic legislators have whittled it down from a $6 billion to a $3.5 billion to a $2-1.5 billion bill that is going to come up way short of fulfilling the Democratic wish list.
Everyone has a reason to be disappointed with what’s transpired here. Republicans, of course, instinctively oppose this sort of social spending and the tax hikes on the wealthy that will pay for it. There are a lot of middle of the road voters who probably don’t understand why Washington Democrats can’t turn a bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. And Democrats are justifiably frustrated that a handful of moderate Democrats are standing in the way of lower prescription drug prices, green energy initiatives, universal child care, paid leave, dental coverage for seniors, and a repeal of the Trump tax cuts, all of which are quite popular with American voters (even if most don’t count them as priorities.) The result will probably be a bill that fails to impress Democrats, leaves independents unmoved, and riles up Republicans, but hey, infrastructure.
Yet for most Americans, this is all inside baseball. What most Americans see in the debate over the reconciliation bill is Washington haggling over legislation that does not directly address the pandemic or “the economy” rather than simply doing whatever it is that needs to get done. This is one of the stranger aspects of Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema’s approach to the reconciliation bill: The longer they drag on negotiations in order to (presumably) make the bill more palatable for moderate voters, the more likely they turn off those moderate voters by bogging the bill down in process. Simply put, voters aren’t paying much attention to what’s going on with this bill. When they hear about the reconciliation package in the news, they don’t understand its details, but they do see a Congress led by Democrats that can’t get its act together to conduct the country’s business and a president struggling to enact his agenda. (This was compounded by the recent debt ceiling drama, which is just another reason to get rid of the damn thing.) It suggests Biden is a less than competent leader, and probably accounts for a fair portion of his decline in popularity. If these bills do pass, Biden could regain his footing and start rebuilding his support. My guess, though, is that their passage after all this time will go off like a dud firework. (Note to Democrats: The next time you regain control of Congress—which will be, at the rate we’re going, sometime in the 2030s, if we’re lucky—have the bills ready to go beforehand.)
So there you have it. If Biden and the Democrats hope to shore up their standing before next November, they’re going to have to hope the pandemic and inflation are in the rear view mirror by next summer and they’ll need to deliver something legislatively that can rally their base. They’re also going to need to pivot on their messaging in two big ways. First, they need to make sure the American people understand that the Build Back Better plan is an economic plan aimed at helping middle and working class Americans get back on their feet following the pandemic. The message is simple: For decades, Washington has bent over backwards to fulfill the interests of the wealthy and powerful in this country. It’s time we honor those Americans who worked so hard and sacrificed so much to keep this country up and running during the pandemic with policies that will put their families on a surer financial footing going forward.
Secondly, Biden has to move on from casting himself as a competent politician hired by the American people to manage a national crisis to portraying himself as a moral leader who can help shape the country’s future. The American people are not inspired by politicians who promise they will be good administrators. Given the unwieldy nature of the American government and the likelihood that events outside of one’s control will mess with politicians’ plans, it’s also a recipe for failure. It is better for a politician to cast him- or herself as a moral leader guided by a vision of what a good society would look like. Americans are more likely to respond positively to that.
It is easy to feel frustrated with Biden’s dismal poll numbers because he is such an obvious improvement over his predecessor. There is still time for the president to recover, though, and fortunately the American people still hold his opposition in low regard. I suspect the months ahead will be rough, and it won’t be easy to turn things around—much of it will depend on events and trends outside his control as well as the willingness of moderate Democrats to ditch the filibuster and back a more liberal agenda—but getting focused on these problems now is necessary if Democrats hope to avoid a wipeout in the years to come.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “I’m Only Happy When It Rains” by Garbage (1995, Garbage)