Following weeks of legislative victories and positive economic signals, President Joe Biden is gearing up to spend the fall months on the road campaigning for vulnerable Democrats and what remains of his own agenda.
Still, despite coming off arguably the most successful streak of his presidency, Biden’s approval ratings remain underwater. Just a hair over 40% of respondents approved of Biden’s job as president in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, a roughly 4-point bump compared to the lows of his term registered in mid-July.
Biden’s approvals appear directly tied to inflation, and though the consumer price index did not rise from June to July, core inflation still caused year-over-year price increases of 8.5%, driven in large part by increases in the costs of food and shelter. Biden and allies also face an uphill battle to convince voters that the newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act will help them save money in the immediate future. While the healthcare pricing aspects of the bill kicked in upon Biden’s signature on Aug. 16, the bulk of the clean energy tax credits won’t go into effect until 2023 or 2024.
White House officials have rolled out the bones of Biden’s new midterm election campaign over the past couple of weeks. In short, the president and his top surrogates will spend the coming months ahead of Election Day, Nov. 8, crisscrossing the country. They’ll seek to contrast Biden’s role in passing the Inflation Reduction Act and other recently enacted laws with the “extreme MAGA agenda” pushed by Republicans. In total, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Cabinet secretaries, and other high-profile administration figures will make 35 trips to 23 different states before Nov. 4.
“Other upcoming events will illustrate how President Biden worked to get things done, including passing a historic gun safety law and making smart investments to keep our competitive edge and rebuild American manufacturing through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” said a recent memo authored by White House communications director Kate Bedingfield and senior adviser to the president Anita Dunn. “Our goal for the next few weeks is simple: Take our message — one that we know resonates with key groups — and reach the American people where they are.”
Several Democratic groups plan to supplement Biden’s own messaging push with a $10 million TV ad campaign running for the next 90 days in an effort to define Democrats’ legislative wins in voters’ minds.
“It is essential that people understand the magnitude of what just happened,” Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, said of the push. “We need to aggressively tell this story.”
The timing of Biden’s victory lap comes as no surprise, but a number of the president’s closest non-White House advisers indicated during his recent vacation in South Carolina that down-ballot Democrats are extremely concerned about the strategy.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) was instrumental in helping Biden secure the 2020 Democratic nomination but stopped short this week of saying whether he thought the president should run again in 2024.
“This race is like a horse race,” Clyburn said in a statement. “I wouldn’t bet on any race before I knew which horses were in.”
“People want to see everything happen tomorrow morning. And if it can’t be a tweet that makes the evening news or the morning headlines, people think it’s not getting done,” Clyburn continued. “If people go to the polls this coming November and give us overwhelming numbers, the rest of this stuff left on the table will get done.”
Dick Harpootlian, former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a longtime Biden supporter, is optimistic about Democrats’ chances of holding both congressional chambers in November but is frustrated with the help coming in from the White House and national Democratic organizations.
“The outreach is awful,” said Harpootlian, a state senator whose wife, Jamie Lindler Harpootlian, is the ambassador of the United States to Slovenia, appointed by Biden. “The engagement with supporters is really poor. They don’t give much guidance on what to say. If you want the troops to follow you, you’ve got to communicate with them, and yes, that means hearing their complaints.”
Biden has received similar signals in recent months, with some local politicians skipping out on planned appearances by the president in their districts, and polling consistently shows that an overwhelming majority of Democrats want the party to nominate someone else in 2024.
Meanwhile, Republicans plan to spend the fall escalating attacks against the 15% corporate minimum tax and a doubling in funding for the IRS as violations of Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on households earning less than $400,000 per year.
“Biden and Democrats are out-of-touch and do not care about the pain and suffering they are causing Americans,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. “Democrats celebrate raising taxes on families during a recession they created and weaponizing the IRS to target small businesses and hardworking Americans.”
