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“There is no good news here. Everything is under his watch, ”said Paul Maslin, one of the top Democratic pollsters who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean. “You can discuss what he’s doing or not doing, but that’s almost irrelevant. If things are chaotic and bad, it won’t help him.
Democrats are already starting to calculate the potential cost to the party in 2022. Over a drink on the sidelines of a recent Democratic Governors Association meeting in Aspen, Colo., Donors and party members took stock in private on Afghanistan damage and resurgence The coronavirus pandemic could weigh on the party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections. The record was bleak.
“When Biden was elected, it was supposed to be ‘Oh, the adults are back in the room to take matters in hand,'” said a strategist who was in Aspen. “It turns out that there is nothing we can do. Any Democratic strategist who thinks this won’t impact Biden’s midterms or re-election, it’s clear they don’t know what they’re talking about.
The drop in Biden’s approval rating is particularly alarming for Democrats, as a president’s approval rating is closely tied to a party’s midterm performance.
Biden’s approval ratings, which plummeted until the mid-1940s, are roughly where Clinton did at this point in his presidency, and they’re worse than Obama’s in 2009, before his presidency. A self-proclaimed “bombardment” halfway through the following year. Democrats today hold a slimmer majority in Congress than either of these presidents, with less margin for error in the upcoming midterm election. And that was before a summer when nothing seemed to be going well.
On Friday, Biden was forced to respond to the release of a weak jobs report in August. Then he traveled to Louisiana, where he examined the damage caused by the hurricane. The Caldor fire that burned the Lake Tahoe area slowed over the weekend. But new wildfires were burning in California and on Tuesday he was visiting storm-ravaged areas of New York and New Jersey. The Delta variant, meanwhile, has plunged the country into another wave of Covid.
“The guy can’t take a break,” said Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former White House deputy chief of staff in the Carter administration. “It reminds me so much of going back to that time, when we had Mount St. Helens, we had Three Mile Island… we had trucker riots… Then we had the hostage crisis. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
Francis added, “Now you have a hurricane and a million people without power in Louisiana. You have wildfires in the west. You have the Delta variant on Covid. No one could criticize him for these things, but they have a way of infecting the overall political environment. What it does is it deteriorates people’s attitudes, and if you’re the one in charge, people pick on you, their frustrations, their anger, whatever it is.
This confluence of events has Biden’s approval ratings at record highs. And Americans are also increasingly pessimistic about the direction of the country. In the six months immediately following Biden’s inauguration, the percentage of adults who said things were “seriously off track” fell by about 20 percentage points. But over the past two months, this dissatisfaction rate has steadily increased and now exceeds 60%.
“None of the things that present themselves as problematic issues were caused by Biden or his administration,” said Doug Herman, who was a senior mail strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns. “But people are upset, their kids come home from school with Covid quarantines, people are fed up with their lives being disrupted, and at some point there is a political penalty to pay, because if everyone world is angry, this is not good for the ruling party.
It wasn’t just Afghanistan that damaged Biden’s reputation. Public approval for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which had hovered above 60% for much of the year, now rests within 50 years, according to the FiveThirtyEight poll average. But the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, including the deaths of 13 US servicemen in a terrorist attack, could prove to be the most damaging.
Although the polls suggested that the Americans were broadly in favor of the policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan, they were much more critical of Biden’s handling of the exit. And for Republicans, it was an opportunity to reopen a line of attack on Biden’s competence that they were unable to stick during the presidential campaign.
“He sold on the skill,” Maslin said. “I think in six months people are not going to attack politics [of withdrawal]. … But the fact that it jumped out at him so fast, the fact that he said it will never be like Vietnam, you will never see the helicopters, and it all happened, and it all happened in two weeks, I think that obviously raises questions about the very thing he’s supposed to be the best at.
Ed Rendell, a former governor of Pennsylvania and Biden’s ally, predicted the party would not suffer from Biden’s management of Afghanistan mid-term because foreign policy is unlikely to be a major issue. Still, he admitted that the exit from Afghanistan “did the most damage, because before … I think people thought the Biden administration had a much higher level of competence to get things done than the Trump administration “.
Biden last week offered a vigorous defense of the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his administration’s pivot in his national platform could reframe the midterm elections for the president’s party on more favorable terms. Democrats are banking on Biden’s ability to push infrastructure and social spending plans through Congress, while continuing to push for immunization levels that could alleviate the coronavirus pandemic ahead of next year’s election. In the best-case scenario for Democrats, Covid will be under control and the economy – a voting problem more likely than foreign policy – will roar. Some Democrats believe it is possible.
Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who served in the Clinton administration as Secretary of Energy and Ambassador to the United Nations, said that “in the end, I think these three crises facing Biden – Covid, Afghanistan and the Hurricane – he’s going to be seen as a president capable of handling crises effectively and compassionately, and that will be a plus. ”
The timing of the crises – more than a year away from the midterm election – could also play a role in Biden’s ability to bounce back. William Owen, a member of the Tennessee Democratic National Committee, said, “Just from a Machiavellian point of view, you want all of these issues to be resolved ASAP. He’s only been in the job for eight months now, so you fix those issues, eliminate them to begin with, and then deal with the day-to-day issues as they arise.
Biden, Owen said, “is doing pretty well.”
But after a trying summer, Biden’s implications for the next few months, especially in Congress, are substantial. Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America who now chairs the Bernie Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution, said the progressive members of Congress he was consulting express “grave concern about the way we plow what is, hopefully, the latest chapter in Covid – of this magnitude. , anyway – and create a feeling that we can have a much happier life, looking towards the end of this year and the new year. “
Cohen is optimistic. But if Biden is to put the summer of 2021 behind him, he said, a multibillion-dollar spending plan at the center of Biden’s agenda “must be a turning point” for the administration. If he passes, it will give Biden – and his party – a major victory to celebrate just as the 2022 campaign begins in earnest.
It’s possible that, even if the mood of the electorate does not improve, voters will not exclusively punish Democrats in 2022, but rather incumbents of both parties. Public approval from Republicans in Congress was lower overall than Democrats, according to a recent Georgetown University battlefield poll. And if voters still compare Biden to his predecessor – or if Trump becomes a major polarizing force in the midterm election, as seems likely – the contrast between Biden and Trump’s handling of challenges such as Covid may isolate the current president and his party.
“It sometimes feels like the apocalypse when you wake up and turn on the news,” said Megan Jones, former Harry Reid advisor and Nevada-based Democratic consultant. “You have the Delta raging, you have a fire the size of New York City, and you have flooding. It’s too much for everyone. But I can tell you every day that I thank God it’s Biden and it’s not Trump handling this.
Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster who advised Biden’s 2020 campaign, said August was “a month of very bad news, and also a month of unpredictable news, and that made the public very depressed.”
“That was it,” Lake said. “It’s the fires, it’s the hurricanes, it’s Haiti, it’s Afghanistan, it’s the Covid, it’s the economy, it’s back to school. But the point is, in most cases people don’t blame Joe Biden for it, and in some areas, like Covid, they still think he’s doing a good job. ”
The outcome of the midterms, Lake said, could “depend on the fall and what the Democrats and the administration can do.” … They have the potential to have a really good fall.
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