Here's an interesting thing. I was looking at Joe Biden's approval level trying to figure out what events plausibly produced especially big drops when I happened upon YouGov's tracking poll. Most polls consist of responses from all adults, but the YouGov poll is limited to registered voters. This makes a difference: Gallup's poll, like most others, show that Biden has suffered a 15% drop between inauguration and today. YouGov's poll shows only an 8% drop.
More interestingly, the YouGov poll also makes all its crosstabs freely available:
If these numbers are accurate, Biden's biggest drop has been among women and college dropouts. He's also lost significant support among Hispanics and the elderly.
Conversely, his decline among the young, which conventional wisdom says is large, is actually just average. And his decline among high school grads is quite small.
The four demographics with the biggest declines are interesting. There's nothing that really seems to tie them together. Why have women lost faith in Biden? And why have college dropouts declined far more than any other educational group? And what's going on with the elderly? Biden hasn't done anything to piss them off that I can think of. It's all very odd.
POSTSCRIPT: For some reason, YouGov had a crosstab for men but not for women. What's up with that? So I had to extrapolate the numbers for women on the assumption that the poll had equal numbers of men and women. Thus, the figure for women might be off by a point or two.
POSTSCRIPT 2: So what events plausibly produced especially big drops? I never got a good handle on that. There's a drop in August that's probably caused by the Afghanistan withdrawal. But there's also a drop in July when nothing much was happening. And another drop in December, which I guess might be Omicron related?
I would guess for women part of it might be the lack of forgiveness for college loans and lack of help with childcare, and for the elderly the lack of promised improvements to Medicare for things like dental coverage. Being promised something and then not getting it is worse than not promising in the first place. For everyone it is inflation, inflation, inflation.
That sounds right. The college dropout demographic is definitely the hardest hit by student loan debt: they have the debt, but not the degree. Biden promised to help and has yet to deliver on this (aside from people screwed over by for-profit diploma mills). Also women, particularly college age women, went for Biden by overwhelming percentages in 2020, so their numbers had the most to fall, too.
Also irrelevant voting bloc.
Presidents always get a big boost initially, and then approval drops off as people's expectations come back to earth. Even Trump got this boost, probably from people who knew little about him.
Biden's approval/disapproval took a modest hit for the Afghanistan withdrawal but overall it has been a fairly steady decline since inauguration. There were no big drops. A President probably needs some successes or major events to counteract this kind of decline, and this has not happened. Or actually there has been a good recovery but various things have distracted attention from it. But major legislative successes were only possible with the approval of Manchin and Sinema.
Since his approval ratings are up since December, the posts in this thread are quite wrong. Biden had legislative wins. It meant little. It wasn't until unemployment dropped below 4% that the turn began.
I wonder what the end of Roe will do.
Boost sales for your coathanger business, you opportunistic, conservative douchnozzle.
Putin's intended puppet dictator of Ukraine captured,
https://www.rawstory.com/viktor-medvedchuk/
The guy looks sad.
If you look at the 538 average pretty much ALL of the drop occurred from Aug-Oct (he's dropped about a point total since Nov 1). I know the received wisdom is 'Afghanistan' but I think it's more a combination of:
- Delta ending the 'false spring' of covid normalcy in late July/arly August and
- endless daily headlines of daily intra-party bickering and failure of BBB
I don't think the actual failure to pass stuff itself caused the drop (notice it stabilized before Manchin nailed the coffin shut) it was more the 'impression' of lack of control.
My theory.
Women may be particularly annoyed by the failure to reopen schools in September, since one suspects that the burden of extra childcare fell predominantly on them. Also, to the extent that they are more likely to do the family grocery shopping, they may observe inflation more immediately and frequently.
My wife and daughter never liked Biden, so I have no first hand observations.
Schools reopened.
Where are they still all-virtual all-the-time?
The elderly is pretty obvious. If you're a working adult, you've got a good shot at a raise to offset inflation. But if you're on a fixed income? Oof. Most elderly people don't have a lot of investment income to fall back on, either. So this past year has been a bite taken out of their finances which they have no way to recoup... ever.
my guesses:
women - failure to protect reproductive rights
college dropouts - didn't cancel student loan debt
elderly - inflation
hispanics - i dunno
Is biden really to blame for all of these? nope. but he's the president and he'll get a lot of the blame, deserved or not.
"And what's going on with the elderly?"
Fox.