President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are slipping as he grapples with his bungled Afghanistan withdrawal and his administration’s struggle to end the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s average approval rating dipped below 50% this week for the first time of his presidency, and it has Democrats rattled before the 2022 fall campaign season begins next year.
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According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, 49.3% of respondents approve of how Biden is handling the job. In RealClearPolitics’s aggregation of polls, 49.6% told researchers they approve of Biden as commander in chief.
If Matt Grossman, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, was a betting man, he said he would predict Afghanistan will have a negative net effect on public opinion of Biden for two reasons. First, public sentiment is influenced by news coverage, and reporters have been highly critical of the situation, he explained.
“The second reason is that people tend to follow their political leaders’ assessments,” he said. “When the party leaders divide on an issue, so does the public on party lines. When the party leaders are more uniformly negative or positive, the public follows that as well.”
Biden’s polling decline is not an outlier, particularly after former President Donald Trump and amid a trend of hyperpartisanship. Trump’s average approval rating for his four-year term was 41%, according to Gallup. Barack Obama’s average from his eight years in office was 48%, while George W. Bush’s was 49%, and Bill Clinton’s was 55%. George H.W. Bush’s was 61%.
“The decline is actually sort of late. Some other presidents have had the honeymoon over sooner,” Grossman said.
But Biden’s polls are notable given their relative steadiness during the first six months of his term. Though they started sliding in late July, his numbers also indicate his reelection chances and how Democrats will perform next year.
“Most people, I think, were attributing it to COVID resurgence and worries about economic fallout from COVID resurgence,” Grossman said. “But it’s also possible that it was a sort of inevitable decline, as the few Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who had given him the benefit of the doubt at the beginning stopped doing so.”
Now, his approval ratings are at risk again as U.S. citizens and Afghan allies crowd Kabul’s international airport, hoping to escape the Taliban-controlled country.
The White House has not publicly pointed to polling concerning Afghanistan. Instead, press secretary Jen Psaki has painted Biden’s decisions as “difficult choices a commander in chief needs to make on behalf of the American people.”
“The president made clear: After 20 years at war, it’s time for American troops to come home. And as he said at the time, the status quo was not an option. The Taliban was prepared to attack U.S. and NATO troops after May 1, which was the deadline for our departure,” she said in early August, referring to Trump’s drawdown plan.
Both she and Biden have cited the amount of money the United States has spent in and on Afghanistan, as well as the number of servicemen and women who have died.
But the Democratic National Committee, apparently aware of the problematic optics, shared a survey from liberal polling firm Data for Progress with reporters Wednesday morning.
The Data for Progress poll suggests a plurality of respondents still backs the decision to leave Afghanistan, one-third of whom identified as Republicans. But the email does not address the Biden administration’s botched management of the evacuation process. Neither do notes from Democratic operatives trumpeting GOP endorsements of the exit.
For Grossman, the exception to the general rule that voters care more about domestic policy than its foreign counterpart is when troops die.
“The decision was made with public support for getting out,” he said. “But the public is not necessarily known for consistency between what it says it wants before something happens and its reaction to that when it does happen.”
Quinnipiac University Poll analyst Tim Malloy concurred it was “too early” to connect Biden’s numbers to Afghanistan.
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“He has been leading the charge in the battle to beat back COVID, so why is President Biden losing ground with Americans? As the unvaccinated fall victim to the delta variant, the ‘turning the corner’ optimism from the White House may be starting to ring premature,” Malloy said.
