By Dave Andrusko
NRL News Today has tracked President Joe Biden’s freefall in countless stories. No surprise that the tiny percentage of Republican who approved of his job performance has all but vanished. Much more surprising is Biden’s precipitous fall from grace with Independent. To take a representative survey, according to Civiqs, “Among independents, his approve-disapprove rating is 22-67.”
But it’s how Biden is perceived by Democrats that is the real shocker.
“Democrats Have Been Souring On Biden Since Last Summer” reads the headline from FiveThirtyEight. Alex Samuels and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux story and it is a must read.
They argue that Democrats were pleased as punch for the first six months before Biden’s job approval numbers started heading south.
By Biden’s six-month anniversary in office, though, Democrats were starting to feel a lot less certain that Biden could deliver on his big plans and promises to return to normalcy. Now, more than a year into his presidency, Biden is facing sliding approval ratings and growing doubt — even among his own supporters — that he can restore the country to where it was pre-pandemic.
After talking about his dip in Independent’s support, Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux switch gears:
Perhaps what’s most striking, though, is that optimism among Biden’s base, Democrats, also started to evaporate.
According to weekly tracking surveys conducted by YouGov, the president once enjoyed the support of large shares of Democrats. Per a June survey, 53 percent of Democrats classified him as a “very strong” leader. However, that number dropped significantly by early August, when a new YouGov survey showed that only 44 percent of Democrats viewed him in the same light. And by mid-September, that number dropped even further, to 37 percent.
Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux cite Biden’s failure to deliver on every big promise he made but none is more telling that his insistence that inflation was “temporary.” What to do?
Well….
To dispel the gloom that’s enveloping some of his supporters, he’ll have to make people feel better about the pandemic and the economy as well as fulfill more campaign promises — which, as the past year has shown, turns out to be much easier said than done.
Good luck with that.