More Democrats are speaking out against President Joe Biden’s policies on everything from immigration to mask mandates as his poll numbers sink to new lows.
The latest example of Biden’s out-of-touch approach to issues central to the voters who will decide his party’s fate came this week when the White House initially condemned a court ruling that ended the federal mask mandate on planes and trains.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki panned the Monday ruling as “disappointing” and urged travelers to continue wearing masks in the air. Her comments came just weeks after eight Democratic senators voted with Republicans to reverse the federal transportation mask requirement, which has become politically toxic for COVID-19-weary people of all political stripes.
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The dissenters included Democratic senators facing tough reelection battles this fall, including New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
Psaki seemingly stood by the White House’s opposition Tuesday despite the positive public reaction that proliferated on social media as airlines told passengers they could shed their face coverings.
“Public health decisions shouldn’t be made by the courts,” Psaki said aboard Air Force One. “They should be made by public health experts.”
Biden has fought the perception that other Democrats have led the national shift away from a wartime footing on the pandemic. Blue-state governors began reversing vaccine and mask requirements weeks before the Biden administration started winding down its push for mandates nationwide, moving slowly to respond to polls that showed COVID-19 mandates were becoming deeply unpopular.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, criticized Biden’s unsuccessful efforts to establish an employer vaccine mandate as “a problem” as far back as December, before the effort was ended by a Supreme Court ruling. Whitmer faces a difficult reelection bid this year and broke with Biden after months of pushing strict COVID-19 policies.
Even politically safe Democrats, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, moved to end COVID-19-related requirements, such as masks in school, long before the White House began embracing such changes.
On immigration, vulnerable Democrats have begun abandoning Biden in droves ahead of what is expected to be a dramatic surge in illegal migration across the southern border.
Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, head of the Democrats’ Senate campaign arm, became the latest Democrat to turn on Biden over immigration when he said Monday that Biden’s decision to end a policy known as Title 42 “should be revisited and perhaps delayed.”
The Biden administration moved earlier this month to terminate the public health order that allowed immigration authorities to expel undocumented migrants on the basis of stopping the spread of COVID-19. Liberal activists had pushed Biden to sunset Title 42, but a growing number of Democrats have criticized the move as rushed and poorly planned.
“There are concerns,” Kelly said during a recent trip to the border. “The immigration system could be more overwhelmed than it already is when President Biden follows through on his plan to lift some COVID-19 restrictions that restricted asylum entries and led to quicker deportations.”
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who is a top target of Republicans looking to flip the Senate in November, has also emerged against Title 42, a rare bit of criticism from a senator who has voted with Biden more than 95% of the time while in office.
Democrats may see little incentive to defend a president who is increasingly unpopular with the voters they’ll need to win over in the months ahead and against an economic backdrop that has already tilted the playing field against Democratic candidates.
Biden’s approval rating has fallen significantly since last summer, when the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan sent his numbers into a tailspin from which they’ve never recovered.
His average approval rating is more than 10% underwater, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, with just 41% approving of his performance on average, versus the 51% of people who on average don’t.
More recent surveys have shown his numbers even lower. A Quinnipiac poll published this week found just 35% of voters approved of Biden’s handling of the job.
That same poll found even more precipitous drops in support among groups considered key to Democrats’ electoral fortunes, including Hispanic voters and young people.
Democrats have braced for carnage in the midterm elections given the margin of Biden’s unpopularity, according to the data website FiveThirtyEight.
Beyond their disagreements on domestic policy, Democrats have also departed from Biden on matters of foreign policy as well.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, considered a close ally of Biden’s in the Senate, said last week that the Biden administration should not take the option of sending troops to Ukraine off the table, as Biden has done, for fear that doing so could embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His comments followed a push by congressional Democrats earlier this year to sanction Russia’s energy sector after the White House expressed reluctance to do so.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear to the White House in the days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that Congress would ban imports of Russian fuels legislatively if Biden declined to do so, reflecting a public appetite for a tougher stance against Russia.
And Democrats have increasingly begun to grapple with inflation more directly than the Biden administration has.
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West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the White House’s most frequent Democratic critic, blamed the White House this week for a failure to “act fast enough.”
Manchin slammed the Federal Reserve and other leaders for “half-measures and rhetorical failures” that have done little to address inflation.
While fewer Democrats have pointed the finger at Biden for abetting inflation, because many voted last year for a COVID-19 stimulus bill that’s now being blamed for sparking the problem, more have broken from the Biden administration in tone, considering it an urgent matter, while Biden aides continue to dismiss it as transitory.
