President Joe Biden complained Wednesday that voters are not taking stock of the “major things” he’s done since entering office.
The president’s comments came during an interview on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, delivered the same day his poll numbers slipped to term lows, in which he bemoaned not being able to “communicate” his successes. However, his 20-minute sit-down with Kimmel was just his second one-on-one interview of the year and the 24th of his 18 months in office.
By comparison, his immediate predecessors were sitting for at least three times as many interviews as Biden. Former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama had given 95 and 187 interviews at this point in their respective terms.
BIDEN’S APPROVAL RATING NOW DEAD-EVEN WITH TRUMP’S AT COVID NADIR
Meanwhile, Biden’s poll numbers have slipped to the same exact levels that Trump suffered in June 2020, as the country was in the full throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and dealing with nationwide protests and riots. His 39% approval rating in Morning Consult’s Wednesday poll marked a 19-point drop compared to June 2021.
Biden has attempted to reach voters in different ways, including holding several town halls, writing two major op-eds over the past few weeks, and delivering multiple prime-time addresses from the White House.
He is also spending nearly $7 million a year on the salaries of 70 White House staffers to craft his social media strategy and frequently hosts celebrities, including chart-toppers Olivia Rodrigo and BTS, at the White House in efforts to lend his proposals extra weight in young voters’ minds.
Furthermore, Biden is traveling the country more in an effort to rally support for his economic agenda and draw attention to the wins he has earned as president, specifically the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure law, ahead of the midterm elections.
Yet compared to Trump, Biden takes sparse questions from reporters at public appearances and ranks dead last among recent presidents in the number of press conferences he holds, dating back to Ronald Reagan. He is averaging just 9.77 per year, while Trump and Obama averaged 22.0 and 20.38 respectively.
One senior Democratic official attributed Biden’s low polling to the Washington Examiner to a simple dynamic, namely that it was much easier for Biden to connect with voters on the campaign trail when he could directly compare his vision for the country with Trump’s behavior during his final months in office.
That person claimed that Republican obstructionism, the war in Ukraine, and the pandemic stalled Biden’s ability to advance his agenda but stressed that the president will “never stop fighting” for the same proposals he promised to deliver while campaigning. They added that the Trump-Biden comparison would come back into focus as the election season kicked into full gear.
On the other hand, Republican National Committee press secretary Emma Vaughn claimed in a statement that “Biden’s refusal to address the American people about the many crises they are facing under his failed administration is inexcusable.”
Biden has been the target of Republican attacks for his long history of public gaffes, yet his semi-media blackout is reportedly frustrating some of his closest supporters and even the president himself.
Senior Biden advisers leaked to Politico that the president does not like how the White House staff are keeping him from talking directly to voters, a sentiment that he has communicated to other top Democrats in private phone calls in recent weeks. The coronavirus pandemic has provided challenges to letting Biden press the flesh with voters, but first lady Jill Biden and Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister and closest confidant, have both reportedly argued in private for letting “Biden be Biden” in person.
Biden also voiced similar frustration during his Wednesday interview with Kimmel.
Asked by Kimmel amid his dipping approval ratings and gridlock on gun violence, voting rights, and a number of other liberal bucket list items “why” Biden remains “so optimistic,” the president said to “look at the kids.”
“This generation is going to change everything. We just got to make sure we don’t give up,” he said.
Biden claimed that “there’s a lot of major things we’ve done, but what we haven’t done is we have not been able to communicate it in a way that is—” at which point Kimmel added, “That’s perfect.”
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“One of the things that is very difficult now is to have, even with notable exceptions, even with really good reporters, they have to get some quick clicks on [the] nightly news, so instead of asking the question — anyway, it just — everything gets sensationalized,” the president added before Kimmel immediately cut to commercial.
