I feel sort of like Rip Van Winkle on Wednesdays. I wake up late, stay awake just long enough to eat a little bit and maybe see a headline or three, and then fall back asleep for the next six or seven hours. Finally, in the late afternoon, I wake up and shake the cobwebs from my brain. Then I check to see what happened while I was all asnooze.
Today, the answer turns out be not much. However, Democrats and Republicans alike appear to be ever more obsessed with Joe Biden's "plummeting" approval ratings and what it all means. Whenever that happens, I like to go straight to the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center to check things out. Biden is the solid green line:
I go to Gallup because it ensures that I'm not cherry picking various polls to find the one that makes me happiest. I always look at the same one.
So, yeah, Biden's approval rating is a little low compared to Bush and Obama at similar points in their presidencies, but not in a way that looks historically unprecedented or anything. He's been a few points below Bush and Obama ever since he took office.
So we'll see. Maybe Afghanistan left a sour taste in people's mouths. Maybe COVID-19 is still taking a toll. Maybe it all depends on whether Democrats finally pass a decent safety net bill. Offhand, though, I'd say it's because new presidents almost always lose around ten points of approval by the end of summer.
Am I being a little too nonchalant about this? Could be. Biden has lost six points in just the last month. Still, it's the tail end of the dog days of summer and nothing much is going on except for squabbling over the spending bill. I'm just not sure it means much. It'll all change soon enough if memories of Afghanistan fade and Biden manages to pass a good chunk of his agenda.
We'll see. But my gut feeling is the majority of Americans are fed up with their society, and they're going to take their resentment out on the people they perceive to be running things, whether they be business owners or politicians or journalists, regardless of partisan affiliation.
I doubt it. Elections are coalitions.
Am I being a little too nonchalant about this?
I'd say not. I've had similar thoughts. I'm pretty sure no one over 35 is employed by MSM these days.
Presidents take office. They enjoy a bit of a honeymoon. Then the honeymoon fades. Then they usually suffer losses at the midterms. Then they usually go on to win reelection. There are exceptions. And there are obviously no guarantees. But the pattern Biden is experiencing looks pretty unextraordinary to me.
You think republicans will certify the 2024 election if they have the house?
You think I would care??? Certification is irrelevant. It always has been.
You think republicans will certify the 2024 election if they have the house?
Maybe not. GOP elections nullification is definitely an X factor, and a huge worry. I was simply chiming in to agree with Kevin's observation that Biden's poll numbers don't look particularly unusual
YOU ... HAVE MEDDLED WITH THE PREVAILING NARRATIVE, MISTER DRUM, AND WE WON'T HAVE IT!
Presidential approval doesn't mean much for midterms anyways. Those are regional, state driven proxy's. More on the party's job as a whole. 2010 is a great example of Democrats reneging on infrastructure, stopping offshoring and pushing through a unpopular health care bill. They got blasted in northern states, which they still are trying to recover to this day.
1982 Reagan had poor approval numbers, but only ended up losing one Senate seat after a large historic gain in 1980. The key is providing a framework to run on in 2022 that can give these state challengers a base while having their own particular regional flavor, which may not always agree with DNC institutional liberals, which for all the hype, are not anti-establishment.
I'd say wait until all the reconciliation horse-trading is over and the bill passes, along with the infrastructure deal. (And they will pass, after Manchin and Sinema get their pound of flesh.)
If that doesn't give Biden a decent bounce, then it may be time to worry.
+ no more covid waves. Those things are approval killers(plus him coming off as heavy handed in September didn't help, but he has learned that lesson).
He'll get his biggest bounce from falling covid numbers. I would think things look vastly improved by Christmas, although I also predict we'll have a fifth wave over the winter (which will be less severe than the current wave that's beginning to recede; that's a pattern that looks like it might be getting established: recurring waves of diminishing severity).
I'd say overall there's a strong chance that, a year from now, supply chains will be stronger, covid deaths will be greatly reduced, and the overall economy pretty strong. Democrats will probably lose the House even under those circumstances, but they might pick up a Senate seat or two.
Though the Trump tax cuts were unpopular, his Approval improved afterwards. At the moment Washington is a bad look. Passing something should help.
"Am I being a little too nonchalant about this?"
No. It's just media navel-gazing, with, as you say, nothing else basically going on. I think it's safe to say Biden's support is probably a lot softer than Obama's but the more extremist the GOP becomes the quicker the support hardens.
"1982 Reagan had poor approval numbers, but only ended up losing one Senate seat after a large historic gain in 1980."
The GOP actually gained a seat in the Senate that year (although there were a lot of close elections) which should have told Democrats that not everyone was unhappy with the country's direction even with a recession going on and when things improved, well, you know the rest of the story.
Watch the Senate races next fall because they will say a lot. Dems can increase their numbers
Why does the line for Bush end before the others?
The trend of the most recent 22-odd weeks looks rather more steep fir Biden than his three predecessors.
My guess is that the line ends for Bush because that's when post-9/11 polling turns him into a complete outlier from which there aren't really any lessons to be drawn.
Everyone except Trump had a lot of bouncing around. I wouldn't draw much conclusion from any small segment of the lines. If Biden's numbers continue to drop in a way that exceeds the others, then start worrying.
May or may not be a big deal, but what is a big deal is how starved for water the southwest is,
https://old.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/q2lb94/mysterious_whirlpools_appear_in_nevada_desert/
Cld
Water is the new gold in the SW
Hard to come by
Hard to get
And everyone is fighting over it
Looks like someone finally flushed.
Biden's job approval rating is artificially depressed by extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
+1
Ivermectomania!
"This isn't a nice thing to say about a bunch of mostly sane and approximately reasonable people, but here's the truth: If you set out to design a left-center political party that was fated to surrender, little by little, to authoritarianism — because of circumstances beyond its control, because of internal indecision and ideological fuzziness, because it faced an entrenched and deranged opposition party, because of whatever — you could hardly do better than the current version of the Democratic Party.
This raises the question of whether the Republicans are the only party that needs to be badly defeated in order to recover a sense of purpose. Don't get me wrong here: It would be far preferable if the Democrats could work out how to win power and then use it effectively. I'm not advocating voting against them out of some contrarian or puritanical impulse, and I'm not even dragging out the old Bernie vs. Hillary generational and ideological conflict for another go-round. (Of course that remains an important source of friction, but it's genuinely not the central issue right now.)
If the current mishmash that is the Democratic Party simply isn't up to the task, if it's imprisoned by its donors and trapped in an old political paradigm while facing the birth of a new one, if it can't summon up the energy or determination to act decisively on behalf of supposedly shared principles, then what the hell is the point? Maybe they're the party that needs to be torn down and rebuilt, especially since the other one is an entirely lost cause."
https://www.salon.com/2021/09/22/no-exit-for-democrats-mitch-has-them-trapped-and-the-path-ahead-is-darker-than-ever/
What is there to approve of?
Democrats are a mishmash because they are made up of an extremely diverse coalition, and the U.S. Constitution is structurally biased to produce very weak political parties that have trouble disciplining rebellious members.
Before anyone tries to argue that it doesn't:
1) Right now, Republicans have an easier time keeping their members in line because their coalition isn't diverse at all.
2) No, LBJ wasn't better at holding Democrats together. Especially on civil rights, the Democratic Party of his era fractured much worse than the current Dems have. But they also never had fewer than 62 Senators during Johnson's presidency, so he was able to lose a bunch of them and still pass legislation.
I agree that it is a diverse coalition. But that means it has a hard time being a change agent. It can be an effective manager of the status quo, but it can’t drive real change because doing so fractures the coalition in ways we see played out today. I don’t know that there is a way out of this situation. Maybe the party needs to have that conversation about the realities of governing under these circumstances. Change / reduce expectations. Stop pretending they can address the problems in some fundamental way and simply agree to mitigation.
It’s not very satisfying, but then neither is this current nonsense.
But this undermines your earlier argument that the Democratic Party needs to be torn down. If you do that, you will achieve one of two things. Either you will atomize the coalition and guarantee that it can't win enough elections to ever have power, or you will create a new party that has exactly the same issues that the Democratic Party does.
Simply telling parts of the coalition, "Hey, sorry, but we cannot ever deliver the things that are important to you," is not going to have positive effects. That used to be the way that African-Americans were treated by elected Democrats, but they aren't going to put up with that any longer. One of the costs of being a diverse coalition is that you have to prioritize everything that is the make-or-break for any major component of the coalition. Which, of course, means prioritizing nothing. But there isn't any good way around that, if you aren't willing to reconstruct a system in which a quarter of the population is simply ignored, and their votes counted on because the other side is so much worse.
So, which part of the Democratic coalition are you prepared to marginalize? Japser has it correct. The only way to square this circle is to elect larger majorities. Which is a circular conundrum.
Good comment.
Some of the Democrats’ priorities are seen by members of the party as simply guaranteeing rights that were supposed to be theirs for 230+ years - for women, African Americans, LGBTQ+; so, long overdue and can’t be pushed to the back burner in these times. The other side casts these as culture-war issues, which means that a militant minority lines up behind them.
Another set of progressive-Democrat priorities are aimed at reducing economic inequalities: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, making the tax system more progressive, and improving access to child and medical care and higher education.
The business and higher-income groups that have been trickling into the Democratic coalition generally support the first set of priorities and are much cooler to the second set. The problem as I see it is to convince people (who should already know this) that the economy isn’t zero-sum, that high wages and broad social-welfare programs benefit all.
I think the democratic party needs to "recover a sense of purpose." I hope it does not need to be torn down. But this isn't really working. The point of that original post (which is not my work, but a lengthy quote from the linked article) is that this coalition is already fracturing. It can't deliver. When it tries to deliver, it antagonizes one or more parts of the coalition.
I don't know the answer except to say there are like 3 or 4 parties within the democratic coalition and it is apparent that they don't really have all that much in common anymore except fear of trumpist republicans.
I always vote for democrats and I can assure you that I have no place in the party. It has already marginalized me. It will never deliver the things important to me.
And I don't see how it gets larger majorities... Biden won the presidency but he almost lost congress. He might completely lose it next year. This is a continuation of the losses which started under Obama in 2010. When will they turn it around? When they "recover a sense of purpose."
Sorry you won’t get what you want from the Democratic Party. Welcome to adulthood in a very diverse nation of 330 million people.
I would argue Republicans are tied together with single issue voters while Democrats are held together by race blocks......so nothing has really changed in the last 150 years.
Nearly all of the Democratic Party's problem in Congress right now flows from its microscopic margins. It really is that simple. You don't need perfect unanimity with 240 House members and 57 Senators. By my count there are 270 Democrats in Congress. You can't tell Senator Sinema to go pound sand when her vote alone can sink Biden's legislative agenda.
Bottom line is Democrats simply don't win enough elections (or at least didn't do so in 2020; and yes, it obviously could have been worse; there's a parallel universe somewhere where the GOP still holds the Senate, and Biden can't get judges and cabinet officials confirmed, much less get legislation enacted).
Yes but the Democrats aren't winning enough elections because the Republicans have their thumbs on the scales via severe gerrymandering and voter suppression. We have a toxic stew of hate speech online and lax gun rules, without free and fair elections so that everyone has a voice in America, this will not end well.
Moral: once you elect enough Republicans, you'll never be allowed to elect anybody else again.
Putin's strategy for the Russian state Duma, also.
Or you hope. Republicans control a lot of land, which is partly made to offset mob rule. Your point is rejected.
Add self-sorting, in combination with the overrepresentation of dirt built into the Constitution.
Don't feed the silly little troll.
Biden could raise his approval rating astronomically, like Bush did, I suppose, by failing to prevent a massive terrorist attack here. I just participated in a Gallup survery and gave Biden a thumbs up, but I feel kind of ambivalent about it. What I want to know is when's he going to start a war somewhere? He'd probably get a 10-20 pt bump right instantly and it'd take years to wear off.
Uh-uh. Only Republicans are allowed. If a Dem tries to wag the dog, he'll just be impeached. And the PR will all be negative from day one. (Yet Republicans will continue to howl and whine about 'librul bias.")
I should think there is something of a glowing if not bright line at 50% approval.
And, some past commentary on approval ratings:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/trump-job-approval-heading-down-to-crazification-factor-once-again/
And an example of Kevin straying from Gallup:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/trump-approval-rating-up-this-week/
Sort-of straying, and supporting the 50% bright line:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/04/trumps-approval-rating-really-is-up/
Emphasis on "I always look at the same one" was mine.
Respectfully, I think Kevin is wrong:
1) Does the decline in Biden's public support make agreement with 'conservative' Democrats on the reconciliation bill more difficult? I would say clearly yes.
2) Does the decline in Biden public support impact congressional retirement, or decisions to run, decisions ? Once again I would say yes.
3) If the same polling decline was happening to a Republican President would I, and most left leaning folks discuss the ominous political significance? Once again yes.
IF you want to claim the the decline is not as bad politically as it appears, I might buy that line of argument. However, the idea that declining Biden polling does not matter strikes me as motivated reasoning.
The problem is these approval polls aren't always right. They can help in a presidential campaign as Trump's rising approval ratings mid-late October showed a race tightening, but early in a term, not as much.
Spadesogrey - in the last two elections we saw that the polls were wrong: so point taken.
My concern is this, when polls show information that is not favorable to my desires THEN its 'polling error.' When the polls are favorable to my position THEN its 'the public overwhelming believes X.'
My point, while an imperfect guide, the aggregate of multiple polls likely has some meaning. When one claims that this aggregate of polls does not matter, then its likely motivated reasoning.
Approval ratings aren't what they used to be. It's disapproval of the rival candidate that matters these days.
Yep, ask Mitch McConnell about that. He's made candidate disapproval an art form.
"I agree that it is a diverse coalition. But that means it has a hard time being a change agent. It can be an effective manager of the status quo, but it can’t drive real change because doing so fractures the coalition in ways we see played out today. I don’t know that there is a way out of this situation. Maybe the party needs to have that conversation about the realities of governing under these circumstances. Change / reduce expectations.
This is a good point and I think what has to be realized and emphasized is that not all "change" emminates from Washington D.C. It goes on in state capitols, city halls, community centers, churches, street corners, boardrooms etc. In other words you don't have to wait around for some bill to pass Congress and the President to sign it to see change happen, it's happening as we speak. Maybe it's not as fast or as comprehensive as some would like but when you have half the country resistant of "change" what do you expect? Transcendence? Now that answer may not please the nutball Left which reads Salon or Jacobin but they'll never be pleased. In fact it's in their DNA make-up (like all idealouges) to believe the world is ending tomorrow. You can't deal with people like that.
There is a party of the far Left and that is the Greens and if the Democrats dissatisfy you, then all mean go join them or work with your local DSA and deal with all the fun Leftist sectarianism that goes with it. Then pat yourself on the back when your political legacy is gifting the nation George Bush II and Donald Trump because certain candidates weren't pure enough of for you. Then understand that neither Gore or Clinton could be that pure because they're not as extreme in their beliefs (Gore once called himself a "raging moderate") nor could they be to win their party's nomination for President, especially in a diverse, coalition party.
Matthew Yglesias has made the observation that if the Republican Party came out for climate change policies and universal health care, like the Tories in Britain for example, they would be the overwhelming majority party in this country because most centrists would vote for it, leaving the Dems a cramped minority party focused on city and college town districts. But of course they won't do this because they're funded by fossil fuel and private insurance interests. That leaves the centrists with one viable political option whether they like it or not (or wish to condemn themselves to the political abyss like Andrew Yang). This fact may drive the Left crazy but the only political power they have eminates from the Democratic Party that has to be diverse to win so they have to accept it or just not focus on politics so much. In fact it would probably be a lot better for their health and peace of mind. Sometimes it's best to take a break once and while.
Too dialectical. Most of the Democrats who make up Congress are institutional liberals. Including the center-left. Not enough anti-establishment fever to bring in New voters post 2012 and let's be honest, Trump Organization cultivated these fringe voters taking a small but traditionally Democratic voting segment away from them. When you get beat on the ground, you deserve to lose.
The center-left just doesn't have a mandate for Medicare for all, Green New Deal and need to accept it. When you don't have a mandate, you should remove yourself from making legislation.
“… if the Republican Party came out for climate change policies and universal health care” it would go over about the way Republicans’ endorsements of Covid vaccination has. They’ve spent decades encouraging suspicion and mistrust of government, science, and eventually medicine; they can’t endorse broad Federal action as though they suddenly believed it could manage it competently.
The MSM were hard on Biden for Afghanistan because it was time for some negative coverage after an excess of positive coverage after the election, which is normal, and because the MSM are members of the Blob. If Biden does something the MSM approve of, he could gain a point or two.
Lets also note, 2016 green voters who voted went heavily for Trump. The whole Qnan scam(which is imploding) was really about cultivating anti-establishment liberal beliefs like anti-vax, 5g(I remember 1g paranoia in 2000 lolz), pedophilia are from 20-30 years ago. Biden likewise picked up a ton of Republican suburban voters along the coasts, which frankly were irrelevant. This board is in denial.
The one legitimate problem the Biden Administration has so far which ties into all the problems besetting it is that reacts and seems flat-footed to events rather than get ahead of them. And not only that but they offer rhetoric that winds up looking foolish when said events turn against them. Thus they tell us the worst of COVID-19 is over by the Fourth of July even though the Delta variant was just starting to appear in the U.S and there was a large pool of unvaccinated people who thought the whole thing was over with or overblown to begin with and thus didn't get vaccinated. Thus they tell us Afghanistan won't fall - as U.S. troops and contractors pull out - like South Vietnam did (even though their were plenty of warnings it would- only to find it was worse than South Vitenam. Thus they're warned that Haitian migrants are on the move and Del Rio, Tex. is the likely destination but are shell shocked at seeing so many people willing to live under a bridge waiting to get into the U.S. Now one, I believe their mitigation efforts (vaccine mandates, Afghan airlift, clearing the border area) in the wake of such disasters has been pretty good but voters aren't going to reward them for it, just punish them for having such disasters take place to begin with. Thus the lower poll numbers. Perhaps the good news is they're aren't as bad as they could potentially be.
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