Where did it go wrong for Democrats?

Biden was looking good last January, and his former (and maybe future) opponent was looking especially bad. One national poll had Trump’s negative rating at 59%. Another found that a majority favored convicting Trump for incitement of insurrection, and 57% wanted the Senate to bar him from holding federal office. 

Those were the good old days for Democrats. But around mid-year, things started to change. Biden’s average job rating has now slipped from the mid-50s to the low 40s. One poll had him losing to Trump in a 2024 showdown and found that 64% of the electorate didn’t even want Biden to run again. 

What happened?

First, perceptions of the president’s handling of the pandemic soured. Delta and omicron variants reshuffled the deck, exposing a worrisome lack of preparation. Clumsy communications from official sources added confusion. Biden’s pandemic performance rating slid from 65% in last spring’s NPR/Marist poll to 43% in a recent YouGov poll­­.

Second, the bungled Afghanistan pullout shattered Biden’s image of competence and foreign policy expertise. The damage done to his credibility may never be fully repaired.

Third, Democrats in Congress botched just about everything they touched. Legislative strategies have been amazingly off beam. Messaging has been focused on spending money and not solving problems. All the while, they have appeared to neglect issues many voters care about, from inflation to debt, healthcare to crime, supply chain glitches to border security troubles.

Oddly, Democrats failed to explain the specifics and purposes of their multitrillion-dollar proposals, leaving even party loyalists in the dark. Sticker shock, not confidence, was the consequence. Heavy-handed attempts at labeling everything as “infrastructure,” even when it wasn’t, muddled messaging around the administration’s major achievement — an actual infrastructure bill. 

Fourth, Democrats have misread public opinion. They point to polls showing majorities of voters favoring their social and climate proposals. But when you dig deeper into the numbers, the whole of their agenda appears weaker than the sum of its parts. 

For example, a CNN poll found only 25% of respondents believed Democratic spending proposals would help them and their families. A YouGov poll indicated a common belief that benefits would flow to special interests. Another 57% expressed concern that jacking-up government spending would worsen inflation.

While Washington elites think voters care little about the skyrocketing national debt, YouGov found otherwise, with two-thirds of the electorate expressing worry about the size of the federal budget deficit. That is in addition to long-standing public skepticism of the government’s ability to manage the expenditure of large sums of money competently.

Fifth, Biden’s policies as president have seemed more sharply ideological than what he campaigned on in the 2020 election. As he and party allies have pushed a sprawling progressive Left agenda, they have inadvertently taken on the whiff of the whole politically correct, cancel-culture, democratic-socialist miasma — giving Republicans a heavy club to wield against them in the next election. 

Can Democrats turn things around? 

It’s possible — but there are plenty of “ifs” that need to go their way: if the pandemic dissipates, if inflation tamps down, if the economy strengthens, if the world is generally at peace, and if Democrats get their act together. Those are the conditions necessary to make Biden look better and a Trump-dominated Republican Party, which has yet to offer its own governing agenda, look comparatively worse. 

However, most of these “ifs” are out of the control of either party. 2022 will be an interesting year.

Ron Faucheux is a nonpartisan political analyst and publisher of LunchtimePolitics.com, a newsletter on polls.