In [a recent] Pew survey, 37 percent of voters said they either strongly or somewhat approved of the job Biden was doing in office. Not surprisingly 93 percent of those who strongly approve and 86 percent who somewhat approve say they are voting Democratic this fall. Among the 43 percent of voters who give Biden "very unfavorable" marks, 82 percent of those voters say they are supporting a Republican for Congress.At Politico, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini expresses skepticism about the possibility that Democrats can do well in the midterms, because the party in the White House nearly always loses seats in Congress:
But, among the 17 percent of voters who say they "somewhat disapprove" of Biden, 43 percent say they are planning to vote Democratic this fall, compared to 29 percent who say they'll vote Republican.
In other words, those who are "meh" about Biden are voting for Democrats. This is not something that we've seen before.
The Democratic argument, I guess, would be that this is something of an election almost like ’98 or ’02, where you had kind of a historical event happen that disrupts that midterm pattern. I think that the burden of proof is maybe a little bit higher on Democrats here, because that doesn’t happen very often. The counter-examples are small, right? The ’98 midterm with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the ’02 midterm after 9/11. Is there a possibility that overturning Roe v. Wade was kind of a historical event or a disruption on the level of those things? Yeah, it’s possible. But Biden is not necessarily sitting at a 60 percent plus approval rating as we’re having this conversation.Ruffini's point is that, yes, Democrats did well in the 1998 midterms, but Bill Clinton was a very popular president. George W. Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11. Joe Biden's numbers are going up, but he's not popular.
The simple explanation: It's the Dobbs decision. But Democrats' numbers were better than Biden's even before Dobbs. On May 1, the day before the draft Dobbs decision leaked, Democrats were only 2.4 points behind Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, according to FiveThirtyEight. Biden's approval number at the time was 10.3 points below his disapproval number.
It's the liberalism, stupid. Many voters want what they thought a Biden presidency promised: relief on health care and college costs, efforts to curb gun violence, policies to reduce climate change, tax increases for the rich, seriousness on COVID. But some voters who now say they disapprove of Biden think he hasn't delivered.
When they were in office, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush were seen as doing what they set out to do -- if you didn't like them, it was because you didn't like their policies. With Biden, it's different -- some people don't like his policies, but others think see him as struggling to get the country where he wants it to go. They see a Republican Supreme Court and corporatist pseudo-Democrats blocking his agenda. They see Donald Trump walking free. They see radical Republicans at the state and local level terrorizing teachers and librarians. But Biden hasn't seemed like the solution to those problems.
Amy Walter writes:
There's plenty of reason to think that a good chunk of these "somewhat disapprovers" are Democrats. [A] pollster who shared [a] non-profit survey with me said their survey showed these voters to be overwhelming Democratic and 'skew young.'That was certainly true when Biden's numbers were at their worst in midsummer.
For 30-44 year olds, he is -28.
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) July 11, 2022
For 45-64 year olds, he is -33.
For 65+ year olds, he's -11.
But for the youngest, most liberal, most Democratic group of voters: -50.
The liberal agenda isn't everyone's agenda. We're still more or less a 50-50 nation. But we're a 50-50 nation with a 40-60 skew on the president. That's because of how Biden's competence has been perceived. But he's not on the ballot this year.
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