Why Has Biden's Approval Rating Crashed?
Biden promised rich donors that 'nothing would fundamentally change.' He's paying the price at the polls.
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UPDATE - 2/27/22
This post was originally published in January. And things have only gotten worse for Democrats. The latest Washington Post-ABC poll has Biden at a dismal 37 percent approval:
President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday to a deeply pessimistic nation, one that largely sees the economy worsening under his watch, disapproves of his leadership on key issues and currently prefers that Republicans control Congress after the November elections, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The poll finds Biden’s presidential approval rating at a new low, with 37 percent saying they approve of the job he is doing and 55 percent saying they disapprove.
The GOP is poised to sweep back into power:
A Quinnipiac poll released January 12th found Joe Biden’s approval rating at a low of 33%, with 53% disapproving. An AP story on Biden’s troubles notes that “virtually none of the groups that fueled Biden’s 2020 victory are happy.”
About 7 in 10 Black Americans said they approved of Biden in December, compared with roughly 9 in 10 in April. Among Hispanics, support dipped to roughly half from about 7 in 10. Just half of women approved of Biden last month compared to roughly two-thirds in the spring. There was a similar drop among younger voters: Roughly half of Americans under 45 approved of the president, down from roughly two-thirds earlier in the year.
After 20+ years in politics I don’t put too much stock in individual polls. Still, Biden and Harris are clearly underwater, so before pundits come out of the woodwork saying Biden has moved “too far left,” let’s look at his record, which is decidedly not leftist. If anything, Biden’s poll numbers are tanking because he has refused to embrace popular leftist policies. Promising to be an ethical alternative to Trump, only to perpetuate many of Trump’s policies, isn’t exactly a recipe for political success.
This is Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s actual record:
NO real climate action
NO minimum wage hike
NO serious student debt cancellation
NO effective pandemic strategy (more deaths than Trump)
NO medicare for all — or the promised public option
NO filibuster reform, just speeches
NO voting rights protection, just more speeches
NO court expansion, just a sham commission
NO end to racist policing
NO end to gun violence
NO end to deportations & abuse of asylum-seekers
NO end to cages for migrant children
NO end to brutalizing Afghanistan and Yemen
NO end to droning civilians without repercussions
NO end to massive military budgets
NO end to arming oppressive regimes
NO end to oil drilling and fossil fuel subsidies
NO end to poverty, hunger, and homelessness
NO end to billionaires pocketing trillions
That’s just a partial list of Biden’s broken promises — and broken moral compass. Perhaps worst of all, Biden and Democratic leaders have been abject failures on the COVID-19 pandemic, opting for a negligent vaccine-only strategy and presiding over more deaths than Trump.
As I wrote in a previous memo: According to the New York Times, COVID-19 is “killing Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations. Since Dec. 1, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations.”
Writing for the Guardian, Dr. Steven Thrasher takes the Democratic Party to task:
Two years into this crisis and a year into Biden’s presidency, we seem to be even worse off than we were under Trump in the most lethal metric: more deaths are taking place under the Democrat than occurred under his predecessor.
But Democrats in Washington, Chicago and New York keep using vaccination as justification to keep schools open as daycare centers. Is this really for our collective safety? Or to keep workers earning more wealth for the Democratic donor class?
Establishment Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have always relied on performative opposition and theatrics to pacify their supporters while preserving the status quo. But there’s only so much sideways clapping and Kente cloth wearing you can do, and only so much blame you can pin on Joe Manchin and the Senate Parliamentarian before people see the truth: Democrats, like Republicans, are there to protect the ruling class.
Leftists predicted every bit of this. Biden ran on the claim that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump, but a tin can could have defeated Donald Trump in 2020. Biden was the candidate of the status quo, which is why the establishment rallied around him. Now we see the consequences.
Thanks for starting this substack Peter.