WHY HAVE BIDEN’S RATINGS DROPPED? HIS SPENDING
Democrats are back in Washington to try and make progress on their huge domestic spending bill. A recent Gallup poll shows how hard that’s going to be.
President Joe Biden’s victory last year, combined with January’s news that Democrats would narrowly control the House and Senate, set off speculation on the left that a new New Deal was just around the corner. Even though Biden campaigned as a centrist whose primary aim was to heal the nation’s divides, he quickly proposed a series of bills that amounted to the largest expansion of federal government spending in decades.
There was reason to think the American public was on board. The Gallup poll found in September 2020 that 54% of Americans wanted government to do more to solve the nation’s problems. That was the highest mark in the 28 years Gallup had asked that question.
Democrats were giddy over what they could accomplish even with a narrow congressional majority.
So much for that. As my colleague Catherine Rampell pointed out last week, only 43% of Americans now favor expanding government’s role in national life. That’s roughly in line with the national average since the ’90s, when even Democrat Bill Clinton famously said “the era of big government is over” after being handed a shellacking in the 1994 midterms.
While there were small shifts against bigger government among both Republicans and Democrats, the biggest Gallup change occurred with independents. In 2020, independents favored more government by a 56-38 margin. Today, they oppose bigger government by a 57-38 margin. That’s a massive 37-point swing in one year.
Democrats should note this is nearly identical to the shift in Biden’s support among independents since the election. The 2020 exit poll found Biden won independents by a 13-point margin, but his job approval among this crucial demographic was a net negative 23 as of last week. That’s a 36-point shift in one year, and it emerged just as Biden’s big spending agenda began to dominate the news.
That should terrify Democrats. Many pundits have tried to explain Biden’s slide in approval by short-term factors such as the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the delta variant or the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. If that’s the case, then Biden’s poll numbers should rise as these events fade from public view. But the nearly identical drop in his standing and in support for expanded government among independents points to another cause: Biden’s domestic agenda itself. If that’s the case, Biden and Democrats face a terrible political choice over the coming weeks.
A recent CNN poll puts this dilemma in relief. It found 75% of Democrats want Congress to pass the full $3.5 trillion bill, but only 36% of independents agree. This means the ongoing battle between Democratic
moderates and progressives is really a battle over how much to worry about public opinion and keeping power.
It is no surprise, then, progressives are increasingly saying the party shouldn’t worry about the next election and should pass the bigger bill, especially since history suggests Democrats aren’t likely to win the 2022 midterms anyway. That obviously doesn’t appeal much to members from swing states or districts, such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin or New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, both of whom represent regions that Donald Trump carried in 2016 or 2020. But their stance obviously carries little weight with Democratic primary voters, who overwhelmingly back a big bill. A recent poll of Arizona Democrats, for example, found that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has backed Manchin’s efforts to pare down the bill’s cost, would lose a primary by about 30 points to any of four Democrats tested.
These data show Democrats now face a contest between the irresistible force of Democratic opinion and the immovable object of independents’ values. This unenviable battle has only one winner: Republicans, who will take this contest to the bank next year.