If you’re among those who voted Biden for president in 2019, I’m sure that you’re one of those that don’t confess you did it.
Just 41% of Americans say they approve of the job Biden is doing as president, according to a NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll released January 15th – the lowest the pollsters have recorded during his presidency.
The poll, conducted from Jan. 11-13, coincides with a surge in coronavirus cases, as the nation is once again grappling with a new variant, while rising consumer prices mark another abnormal holiday season. Meanwhile, the president’s congressional clout is in question as his legislative agenda stalls on Capitol Hill.
Approval of the president is unsurprisingly low among Republicans, at 5%. But even among independents, just 29% approve of the job Biden is doing, various recent polls have shown inflation as the primary concern of Americans – even beating out the coronavirus.
But it’s good to know the causes of such historic low rating. Here are a few of the theories in play for why the president keeps losing ground, as well as their flaws.
- AFGHANISTAN: Big events like the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which drew extensive media coverage, temporarily depressed a president’s standing, but this one seemed unlikely to endure. First, voters don’t really tend to weight foreign policy heavily in their assessments; second, majorities of Americans had supported leaving Afghanistan for years, Trump among them. Biden’s numbers never recovered, and have continued to slide—even though Afghanistan has largely disappeared from the headlines once more. Perhaps the effects endured because the withdrawal called Biden’s competence—one of his core campaign selling points—into question, and because the debacle encouraged a general pessimism about the country’s standing overall.
- COVID: Something else happened right around the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal: COVID staged a distressing comeback, even though vaccines had become widely available. The summer had seemed to be a moment of freedom, but then it became clear that the disease hadn’t gone away. Biden’s approval on COVID handling in an NBC News poll, as high as 69 percent in April, fell to 53 percent. During the campaign, Biden promised to do better than Trump on COVID. His ability to connect to voters through grief seemed matched to the moment, but that moment seems over. The national COVID toll recently passed 750,000 and was met with a shrug. Voters don’t want consolation—they want normalcy, and delivering that is likely beyond the ability of any president. Anger about schools being closed for long stretches of the pandemic seems to have been a major factor in Republican victories in Virginia this month. Since August, COVID has waned—by the end of September, the liberal pollster Navigator found that the portion of Americans who thought the worst of the pandemic was yet to come was shrinking fast—and is now waxing again. Biden’s approval has kept sliding through the waves.
- Inflation, Especially Gas Prices: COVID continues to ail the economy too—especially in the form of inflation. By many measures, Americans are better off than they have been in some time (though of course averages elide uneven distribution of gains), and employment is growing quickly. Yet opinions on the economy remain negative. A likely culprit is inflation, which is devouring wage increases. Supply-chain problems, shifts in demand, and the effects of major government stimulus earlier this year all feed rising prices. Biden’s credibility here is also hobbled by the fact that he and his advisers promised that any inflation would be ephemeral, but it has stuck around.
But if you think that Inflation, strategic failures on foreign policy and COVID handling failure are not enough reasons to make Biden so unpopular, Democrats have been at war with one another for months in Washington, and even if voters like the results, the spectacle is deeply unpleasant. You can’t turn on a cable-news channel these days without hearing a Democrat explaining why his or her least-favorite part of the Biden agenda is bad, which may be more persuasive than the predictable parade of Republicans saying the same thing.
