NRL News
202.626.8824
dadandrusk@aol.com

Seemingly each week President Biden hits new low in job approval

Jan 26, 2022

By Dave Andrusko

President Biden is on a real roll. His job approval ratings hover a point or two above or below 40%, his party’s typical advantage over Republicans in the “generic” candidate category has vanished, and when asked by Zogby “if Biden has ‘delivered’ on campaign promises or ‘was lying just to get elected,’ 45.7% chose lying and 38.2% chose delivering on promises. The rest of the voters were unsure.”

The latest Pew Research Center survey results which found him at 41% “are very close to the RealClearPolitics average of several polls, which has Biden at 40.8% approval and 55.2% disapproval,” Byron York reports [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/biden-drags-democrats-down].

This places him in ominous territory after only one year in office. Philip Bump of the Washington Post writes

In new polling from the Pew Research Center, President Biden’s approval rating is at a remarkably low 41 percent. That’s in part because independents view him fairly negatively, as they have for a while. But it’s also because Democrats don’t love him as much as they used to.

In Pew’s data, Biden has gone from 95 percent approval among Democrats last spring to 76 percent in January. Since September, the percentage of Democrats who say they strongly approve of the job he’s doing has fallen from 27 to 21 percent. That’s a problem in part because approval ratings are a continuum: Voters don’t go from strongly approve to strongly disapprove in one fell swoop. First they transition from strong to less-strong approval — as many Democrats have.

A big part of President Biden’s appeal was the belief that he could “work across the aisle”—with Republicans–which was absolutely essential given that Democrats were only by10 in the House and were tied in the Senate. But according to Bump

Pew’s data also suggest that Democrats have not only lost confidence in Biden’s ability to work across the aisle (understandably) but also are far less likely to even see that as a useful outcome. 

Zogby made an interesting assessment:

“There are more Democrats abandoning ship and calling for the president not to run in 2024. Things are so bad for the Democrats right now; you are starting to see Bill and Hillary Clinton reappear in public. Imagine, Democrats trotting out Hillary as the change candidate in 2024! 

Biden’s situation “is particularly worrisome for Democrats because, historically, the president’s party usually loses seats in his first midterm election,” according to York. “But the president’s job approval has a huge effect on how big that loss will be.”

One other survey results. The Hill reports

President Biden’s approval rating hit a new low in the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll as the White House faces crises on multiple fronts.

Biden’s approval rating fell to 39 percent in the poll, which was released exclusively to The Hill. Of that, 18 percent of registered voters said they strongly approve of the job he’s doing, while 21 percent say they somewhat approve. Meanwhile, 53 percent said they somewhat or strongly disapprove of his job performance.

That number is six points down from his approval rating in November, when he was at 45 percent, while his disapproval rating ticked up from 51 percent two months ago. His 39 percent approval rating is the lowest since the poll first started gauging it in March.

Ed Morrissey quotes elections analyst Nathan Gonzales. “Looking back more than 70 years, there hasn’t been a single president who substantially improved his job approval rating from late January/early February of a midterm election year to late October/early November,” he writes, the opposite has usually happened. “In the last 18 midterm elections going back to Harry Truman in 1950, the average president’s job approval rating dropped eight points between this time of year and election day,” Gonzales notes.

The mid-term elections are still 10 months away. York reminds us “Bottom line: Nothing is set in stone. But things are looking bad for Biden and his party.”

Categories: Joe Biden
Tags: