Midterm Issues Watch: President Biden
The American people’s doubts about him are reflected in his job approval rating
If you want to know why there’s a red wave coming on Election Day you can, as I’ve been doing, examine the political landscape issue by issue. But politics isn’t just about issues. It’s about people, too. A large share of the disapproval that burdens Democratic candidates across the country has trickled down to them from one person: President Joe Biden.
The numbers are stark. The RCP average of presidential approve/disapprove polls for the period 10/9-10/20 stands at 42.4% approve, 54.1% disapprove—a spread of -11.7. In polling parlance, the President’s approval rating is underwater—deep underwater. And his unpopularity is contagious.
It’s a truism of American politics that a midterm election is a referendum on the incumbent party and, specifically, on the incumbent president. Voters are looking back at the first two years of his term, and more often than not they’re reminded of things that displease them. That’s why a midterm election is usually bad news for the incumbent party and president. But this year the news isn’t bad for Biden and the Democrats—it’s terrible, verging on catastrophic.
Another political truism is that while it’s difficult to improve a bad situation, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make it worse. That’s what the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats have been doing, almost as it seems deliberately. The list of mistakes, missteps, situations misread, dumb things said, own goals and self-inflicted wounds is long and often laughable. If this is what we get when the adults are in charge—as so many journalists and pundits proclaimed when Biden replaced Trump—well, perhaps maturity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
And indeed, a big part of the problem is an excess of maturity. President Biden was 78 years old on the day he became president, the same age at which Ronald Reagan left office. During the 2020 election he was hardly seen, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. That lucky break, along with the usual Trumpian antics, greased the skids between Biden’s Delaware hideout and the Oval Office. In normal times presidential candidates are vetted on the campaign trail, under the pitiless scrutiny of press and public. In 2020 Donald Trump got that treatment, but Joe Biden did not.
His decrepitude, therefore, only became noticeable after he assumed office. From the beginning it was clear that Biden had lost a step or two. His public appearances were few and carefully scripted; his wife and his staff did their best to minimize his exposure to the press. And it must be said that the White House press corps and the media at large cooperated in this effort to manage the President’s image. At all costs, the public was to be prevented from getting a close, potentially unflattering look at the man they’d elected.
But the presidency is a public office and over time it proved impossible to hide the growing evidence of his decline. It remained a taboo subject in the media for a while longer, but recently the dam burst. During a White House event, Biden called on a member of Congress, Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, who had been killed two months earlier in a traffic accident. “Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana along with two members of her staff in a car accident today in Indiana,” Biden said in a statement released shortly after the accident. Then he simply forgot that Walorski was dead. The story could not be ignored, it received widespread media coverage, and the White House’s attempts to spin it out of existence were less than credible.
However, the plunge in Biden’s approval rating owes more to his numerous mistakes and his lame attempts to gaslight the American people than to his declining mental acuity. And the beginning of the plunge can be precisely dated: April 14, 2021, the day Biden announced that all US forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan. The sequel was a disaster of epic proportions, and the President himself came off as a doddering old fool, deaf to the warnings of his advisors, absurdly trying to spin the debacle as a great foreign policy triumph. From there, it was all downhill. The American people didn’t like what they saw, and Biden’s subsequent behavior has done nothing to reassure them.
Even before he started to lose it, Biden was notorious for bad judgement, mendacity and fabulism. Old age seems only to have magnified those character flaws, validating the good old American proverb that there’s no fool like an old fool. His lies are transparent, absurdly so, as when he claimed recently that he’d run for president on a promise to whip inflation—which was practically nonexistent in 2020. His recent campaign appearance with Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial candidate John Fetterman, still dealing with the aftermath of a severe stroke, was an embarrassment for both men.
In short, a substantial majority of the American people have concluded that Joe Biden doesn’t know what he’s doing, doesn’t understand or care about their top concerns, and is unfit for the office he holds. All those negative judgements are embodied in his miserable approval rating—a resounding vote of no confidence that reflects on the whole Democratic Party. The presidency of Joe Biden may not be listed as a midterm election issue—but it’s there, all right, looming in the background of the midterm election.