Maybe Biden's Approval Is Bad Because Everything Is Horrible

It may not be that complicated.

Joe Biden has had a fairly successful first term. He's already added more jobs than any other president in history in a four year period—which is in part because of the low starting point set by covid, but is still impressive. Inflation, which was a real concern for much of Biden's tenure, has been falling steadily. The pandemic, too, is largely not an everyday concern for most people anymore. That's not exactly Biden's fault—his covid policy post the vaccination push has been lackluster at best. But president's usually get credit and blame whether deserved or not.

Beyond that, Biden ended a major war in Afghanistan, passed a historic climate change bill and a massive infrastructure aid package, and is pushing ahead with student loan forgiveness despite bitter opposition from the Republicans and their lapdog Supreme Court. There have been many wins for progressives, and the general state of things for most people is better by almost every metric than it was when Trump left office.

Yet Biden's approval remains mired in the low 40s; FiveThirtyEight's tracker has him about 2.5 points underwater. His numbers are worse than every president of the postwar era at this point in his presidency with the exception of Jimmy Carter. Why is there such a huge disconnect between achievement and perception?

Some commenters have blamed the news media for not giving Biden credit for his achievements. Others have pointed out that increasing partisanship means that more and more Republicans are less and less willing to admit to pollsters that Biden can ever do anything right.

I think those factors play a role. But I also think that the main drag on Biden's approval may just be that, as the blog title says, everything is horrible.

The US since at least 2016 has been facing a crisis of democracy. One of our two major political parties has embraced fascism with terrifying religious fervor, and the effects of that are frightening and difficult to escape. The Supreme Court gutted abortion rights. LGBT people are facing escalating attacks, up to and including threats of terrorist violence. Red states have launched all-out assaults on local schools, banning books by Black and LGBT authors and letting teachers know that their jobs and even their safety is in peril if they try to do their jobs. Frightening Republican politicians run for office regularly, insisting that the US is a sewer, and promising to "fix" things by unelashing a wave of bigotry and cruelty. Meanwhile, there are more and more extreme weather events—storms, drought, floods, skyrocketing temperatures. And then there's the steady, horrific drumbeat of mass shootings.

There are, of course, always reasons to worry about the future. GOP dysfunction and fascism has I think really created a sense of ongoing crisis, while making it feel almost impossible to address those crises through government. Things feel bleak. And when things feel bleak, people tend to say that the president isn't doing a great job. Which means Biden's approval ratings are terrible.

The caveat here, though, is that people don't just blame Biden. For a large number of voters, the current sense of gloom and terror is perhaps vaguely associated with Biden, but it's also closely linked to the GOP. Certainly the GOP is blamed for the attack on abortion rights, and for the continued omnipresence in public life of Trump, whose approval numbers are even worse than Biden's.

This perhaps explains why in 2022 Democrats won a sweeping midterm victory, despite Biden's approval numbers being more or less where they are now (ie, in the toilet.) Hyperpartisanship and a crisis of democracy caused by a fascist GOP has sunk Biden's approval. But it's also (maybe, provisionally) disconnected approval from electoral outcomes. People feel bad about everything. But they feel worst of all about the possibility of Republican fascist rule.

This isn't a guarantee of Democratic victory in 2024. Biden's low approval certainly isn't going to help him in the next election, and the GOP retains a lot of support and a large structural advantage in the electoral college. Republicans could easily win the presidency. But I think when the public says they don't like Biden, it's not necessarily that they're confused, and it's not necessarily even that they won't vote for him. Biden's approval is low because people are scared about where this country is headed. And who can blame them.