President Joe Biden is facing the country at a significant inflection point.
During his first year in office, the Biden administration saw significant success in fighting the coronavirus and ushering in post-pandemic economic growth. However, the second half of 2021 saw the president’s poll numbers nosedive following a series of compounding public relations disasters, sparked by his withdrawal from Afghanistan and compounded by multiple defeats to his big-government spending proposals at the hands of members of his party. Still, senior White House and Democratic officials expressed hope that Biden can right the ship in 2022 by “focusing on the future,” ostensibly boosting the party’s prospects heading into the midterm elections and providing himself a lifeline before a possible rematch with former President Donald Trump in 2024.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden entered office with an approval rating of just under 56%. He stayed above water until the Taliban launched offensives over the summer, culminating in the toppling of Afghanistan’s government in late August. At the end of January 2022, his polling has essentially reversed and currently sits 13 points in the red. Democrats outside the White House say that consecutive months of events “effectively outside the president’s control,” including global supply chain problems that contributed to domestic inflation and 20 extreme weather and climate events resulting in billions in property damage and hundreds dead, are making the country “focus on the negatives.”
“Has the president accomplished everything he set out to in his first year in office? Of course not,” one senior Democratic official told the Washington Examiner. “But just because the job isn’t finished doesn’t mean he’s failed. The unemployment rate fell to below 4% for the first time in decades, GDP grew at a record rate, and, under the president’s stewardship, the country secured more than a trillion in funding to update our decaying infrastructure. All these signals would have been cheered had they occurred on former President Trump’s watch, and they show that President Biden’s policies work.”
It’s worth noting that Biden’s poor polling cannot be waved off as solely a factor of Republican opposition to his agenda.
Gallup publishes numerous polls tracking the public’s “satisfaction” with the country. As of January 2022, only 17% of respondents say they were satisfied “with the way things are going in the United States at this time,” compared to 36% when he entered office. Gallup also shows that, across 29 of 30 issues and key aspects of everyday life, the public is not only less satisfied now than it was before the coronavirus pandemic began but significantly less satisfied than it was last year. The only issue where satisfaction improved from January 2021 to January 2022 was the acceptance of gay and transgender people.
White House officials have indirectly acknowledged this growing dissatisfaction among all voting groups but are hesitant to attribute that to direct failings of the president. Instead, White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested at last week’s briefing that the negative sentiment was a factor of the pandemic, which, despite Biden’s campaign promises, is gripping the country for a third consecutive year.
“Well, the buck always stops with the president, and he would say that,” she stated. “[But] the steps that we have taken to make progress, to prepare in the United States far outweigh what almost any other country in the world has done to date.”
“That includes ensuring that 87% of the population has had at least one dose, continuing to increase the number of people who are boosted, ensuring we are taking steps to keep our schools open, to make sure communities that have surges have the federal resources they need,” Psaki continued. “So, of course, we are still at war with a virus; that is continuing. And that is the president’s top priority. He has said that before, but I would also note all of those steps that we have taken to ensure we are prepared as we have ups and downs in this pandemic.”
Privately, some White House officials blame Congress for Biden’s poor polling.
“It’s no surprise that people aren’t happy that the president hasn’t been able to fully implement the agenda that more than 80 million people, the most ever in an American election, voted for,” one such official told the Washington Examiner. “But he’s a fighter. He’ll continue fighting for American working families not because it’s politically advantageous but because it’s the right thing to do. He isn’t focusing on Congress blocking Build Back Better, which the majority of Americans support, but instead focusing on the future and how he can help.”
While the White House continues seeking a path forward on his social spending agenda, some in the administration hope that Biden can reverse his skid by multitasking and addressing nonpartisan issues.
He relaunched the White House’s “cancer moonshot” last week with the stated goal of halving cancer deaths by 2025. He pledged travel to New York City and unveil a number of Justice Department initiatives aimed at cracking down on rising crime and gun violence in cities across the nation. Furthermore, Democratic officials believe that Biden can ease the Left’s dissatisfaction with a lack of progress on climate and other social policies by ensuring that retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is replaced by the first black woman on the court.
“Let’s not forget that at this point in 2020, people thought President Biden was out of the primary,” one Democratic official stated. “Things might not look great now, but I’ll never count out a fighter, and at his core, that’s exactly what President Biden is.”
