Joe Biden entered the Oval Office with a clear mandate for his presidency — to make America normal again. But he also came to power with the political and practical tools to do so. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, Biden had three vaccines, all successful at neutralizing the risk of hospitalization and death from the pandemic. He also had a razor-thin partisan margin in Congress — not enough to transform America, but enough to govern according to the consensus as he had promised during his campaign.
Yet a full year after entering office with nearly a 20-point net approval rating, Biden has squandered all the goodwill with which he entered office. His average approval rating has hit an all-time nadir of barely 40 points. At this point in his presidency, only Donald Trump, himself the most statistically unpopular president of the post-war era, had reached a lower point.
