President Joe Biden aspired to be like Franklin Roosevelt, but as he embarks on his second year in office, there are closer parallels between him and former President Jimmy Carter, foreshadowing Democratic defeats in the 2022 midterm elections.
Biden is 10 percentage points less popular than Carter was at the same point in his presidency, according to FiveThirtyEight. Biden’s average job approval rating was 42% at day 380, while Carter’s was 52%.
Biden still has time to find favor with the public and avoid Carter’s approval nadir of 28%, according to Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy. That is despite disappointing swathes of people with his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and the Afghanistan withdrawal. Carter notched his record low on day 903.
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“Food for thought: Effective diplomacy working to keep the Ukraine situation from exploding and the killing of the leader of ISIS [will] likely strengthen the president’s standing,” Malloy told the Washington Examiner of the potential Russia-Ukraine conflict and the death of ISIS commander Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurashi during a raid by U.S. special operations forces this week.
Yet Malloy’s optimism has not stopped Republicans from pushing Carter-Biden comparisons as they try to make the incumbent a one-term president too.
Republicans debuted the Carter-Biden attack last spring after Russian-based cybercriminal group DarkSide hacked the Colonial Pipeline Company, which supplies gas to most of the Eastern Seaboard. The ransomware assault caused fuel shortages across the country.
“Surging gas prices, a disastrous foreign policy, inflation, and incompetence … the similarities between Carter and Biden are striking,” Republican National Committee spokesman Tommy Pigott said last December. “All Biden had to do was keep Republican policies that were working, but instead, he wanted to take America back to 1977.”
Political pundits and pollsters generally consider Carter, a dark horse candidate who beat a Gerald Ford dogged by Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, an underperformer. For example, stagflation plagued his White House domestically, and the Iran hostage crisis and Soviet-Afghan War stirred trouble for him abroad.
Like Carter, Biden is contending with Russian aggression, with his administration claiming this week to have evidence that President Vladimir Putin planned to stage a false flag military operation against his own territory or Russian speakers as a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine.
However, it is Biden’s economy being hampered by persistent inflation, with consumer price increases now at a 40-year high, that is most reminiscent of Carter’s tenure.
“Inflation is a problem,” Biden said last week during a Pittsburgh trip to promote his trillion-dollar spending agenda. “It’s real, and a lot of people are being hurt by it.”
Biden has struggled to hide his frustration with inflation, calling a reporter “a stupid son of a bitch” last week for asking whether it was a liability before the midterm elections.
But the lack of truly persuadable voters in the current political environment may save Biden from embarrassing Carter-like approval, according to Suffolk University polling expert David Paleologos.
“There was this mass of people in the middle,” he said. “If conditions went really well, a person was rewarded because many people would swing to the positive. And if things were bad — and obviously inflation was high, interest rates, the hostage situation, etc. — then you had what happened to Carter.”
Simultaneously, Paleologos emphasized Biden’s right-wrong track numbers. On average, almost two-thirds of respondents tell researchers that Biden is leading the country in the wrong direction, according to RealClearPolitics. Roughly a quarter disagree.
For Paleologos, that data could embolden Democrats to challenge Biden in a 2024 primary, like Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign against the Georgia Democrat. Carter fended off Kennedy’s bid, yet “it damaged him irreparably in the general election” against Ronald Reagan, Paleologos recalled.
“We kind of flirted with that idea in our Florida poll,” he said. “We not only ran [former President Donald] Trump and [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis against Biden — we ran him against [Hillary] Clinton, just as a placeholder.”
“In the Democratic ballot test between Clinton and Biden, Clinton led Biden in that primary,” he added. “It could be anybody who’s well-financed or maybe a former candidate from the last go-around who’s not particularly happy.”
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Biden ran on sprawling Roosevelt-like legislative priorities in 2020, even hosting an event in Warm Springs, Georgia, to encourage comparisons between Roosevelt’s New Deal and his own Build Back Better platform. Democratic opposition to the size and scope of Biden’s $2 trillion social welfare and climate measure has scuttled negotiations over it in Congress.
