CAN JOE BIDEN TURNS THINGS AROUND?
It’s possible the US president might be able to pull it off if his poor ratings are primarily caused by events
US President Joe Biden now sports nearly the lowest job approval rating of any modern president at this stage in his tenure, statistically equivalent to that of Donald Trump. What’s behind the calamitous drop? Is it events beyond his control, or is it Biden himself? The answer will determine whether he can turn things around.
Nathan Gonzales points out in Roll Call that presidential job approval historically declines an average of eight percentage points before Election Day in the first midterm year. Trump is an exception, but even he only managed a one-point rise in job approval between February and November in 2018. Biden would need to increase his ratings by more than four points simply to match the low ratings that his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, had before their party got walloped in the 1994 and 2010 midterms. That’s a pretty tall order.
It’s possible Biden might be able to pull it off if his poor ratings are primarily caused by events. His job approval rating was still above 52 per cent as recently as late July. The decline started in earnest then, as the bad news of the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the swift Taliban takeover of that country dominated the news. His decline continued during the fall as inflation picked up steam and as the omicron variant of the coronavirus gained traction.
If those events truly are the reasons for Biden’s decline, his approval rating will recover as they recede from view. Afghanistan is now in the rear-view mirror, replaced by Biden’s efforts to stop a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of looking powerless on the global stage, Biden now looks resolute and strong, his defenders argue. Meanwhile, the omicron variant is running its course, and people are itching to get back to some semblance of normality. As virus fears fade, popular discontent might fade, too. Tackling inflation will be trickier, but the recent signals from the Federal Reserve that it will soon raise interest rates give rise to hope that inflation will stop going up and might even decline a bit by Election Day. Sum this all up, and it’s easy to see how someone might believe Biden’s best days are still ahead.
Good leaders shape or manage events; Biden instead seems surprised when they occur and is often obstinate and inflexible in addressing their challenges. Americans could be deciding that he isn’t up to the job as they watch him flail.
Administration caught flat-footed
But what if Biden is himself to blame for his own problems? Each of these events was at least partially foreseeable, yet the administration was caught flat-footed by Afghanistan’s rapid fall, it pooh-poohed the threat of inflation for most of last year, and it stumbled in responding to the emergence of a new coronavirus variant. Good leaders shape or manage events; Biden instead seems surprised when they occur and is often obstinate and inflexible in addressing their challenges. Americans could be deciding that he isn’t up to the job as they watch him flail.
Biden could also be hamstrung by the peculiar political challenges that his party’s ideological divides pose. Many pundits are telling him to move to the centre, as Clinton famously did after his midterm debacle. That might be sound advice; even progressives such as David Shor and Ruy Teixeira realise that the left’s cultural agenda is wildly out of step with middle America. But it ignores how Democrats have changed over the past 30 years.
The left today is stronger within the Democratic Party than at any time in US history. In the mid-1990s, Democrats were just as likely to identify as conservative as they were liberal. Self-described moderates were nearly half of the party. Today, more than half say they are liberal, and liberals were even about half of Biden’s general election voters. Clinton could turn to the centre because the left was relatively powerless. Biden does not have that luxury.
The double whammy of Biden’s failure to address issues and Democratic Party internal politics could spell doom for Democrats. Biden is a 79-year-old man who has spent nearly his entire adult life in politics. He’s not going to change his management style at this point in his career. Nor will millions of progressives suddenly decide it’s OK to give up their aspirations. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., recently told reporters that she won’t stop using the phrase “defund the police” even though party moderates have asked her to. Many progressives say Biden’s problems are that he’s not progressive enough. Rather than retreat if the midterms are a catastrophe, they will likely double down on pressing their views.
Democrats’ best hope is that the events theory of politics is correct. If it’s not, and if voters are responding to the qualities and policies Biden has displayed, they are in for a potentially historic wipeout in November.