October 25, 2021

What’s Behind Biden’s Polling Plunge?

Joe Biden’s approval numbers haven’t bounced back, and for good reason.

It’s one thing for a president to be polling poorly. It’s another thing entirely to have a strong majority of the American people think he’s neither physically or mentally up to the job.

Take Joe Biden. No, really. Take him.

Our current president’s popularity is at the lowest point of his administration. He’s at 42.3% approval and 52.1% disapproval, or -9.8% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, and the only thing keeping his numbers from being considerably worse than that are a couple of outliers — a couple of polls from pro-Democrat Reuters/Ipsos and Economist/YouGov which put him at a wishful thinking -2 and -3 respectively. A recent poll from Grinnell College conducted by the same folks who bring us the highly respected Des Moines Register poll put Biden’s approval number at a dismal 37%, with 50% disapproving and a whopping 12% who are undecided — which is to say they’re afraid to weigh in honestly for fear of a Deep State audit from Biden’s IRS.

More remarkably, a recent Rasmussen survey finds that only 27% of likely voters are very confident that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of being president, while another 14% say they’re somewhat confident. Conversely, 50% are not at all confident, and 8% are not very confident. So Joe Biden is 17 points under water as to whether he has the physical and emotional attributes to carry out the presidency.

There are any number of reasons why the American people have had enough of Scranton Joe. One of them is the illegal immigration crisis. And when asked by friendly Anderson Cooper at a disastrous CNN town hall last week whether he should go down to our southern border to get a first-hand sense of the all-time record numbers of border-crossers, and to hear the ground-level condemnation of his open-borders immigration policy, Biden said: “I’ve been there before … I know it well … I guess I should go down.” But then he complained that he hasn’t had “a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.”

Must be tough with all the calamities competing for his attention. Illegal immigration merely threatens to remake the demography of our nation and beggar us by adding countless new dependents to our overburdened welfare state. As our Brian Mark Weber noted recently, “What most Americans consider a crisis is nothing more than part of the plan to Biden and company. This is intentional, and it’s not going to stop until we stand up and elect people who recognize our border and do what it takes to secure it.”

As for Biden’s claim that he’s been to the border before, even CNN was fact-checking him, finding his claim to be dubious at best, and perhaps referring to the time he was “on his way from an airport in the border city of El Paso, Texas, to a campaign rally in a New Mexico town that is located just under an hour from the border.”

Biden’s unpopularity isn’t limited to Republicans, though. He’s losing Democrats, too. The recent polls Quinnipiac and Grinnell showed him with roughly 80% approval among his fellow party members — a number which was well into the 90s when he took office. Look for this number to continue to slip downward, since a political party’s electoral fortunes are tied directly to their president’s performance and popularity.

Another reason for Biden’s bottom-dwelling is that consumer confidence in his economic policies has noticeably declined over the last six months, according to a well-regarded University of Michigan poll. Inflation is palpable and is a growing concern, and so is our nation’s screwed-up supply chain. When it comes to the economy, the confidence level of the American people is significantly worse than it was a month before President Donald Trump left office, and the overall perception of Biden’s Build Back Better plan is that it won’t make much of a difference. Only about 40% of Americans say it’ll help them or the nation’s economy.

Misplaced priorities aren’t helping, either. Take “climate change,” for example, which is a big part of his Build Back Better plan, but which a mere 35% of voters say is an extremely important concern of theirs.

As for voting blocs that are traditionally and reliably Democrat, recent polling suggests that Hispanic approval of Biden’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy has fallen sharply, with just 45% of Hispanics approving of his handling of the pandemic, compared with 65% in early June. And Politico/Morning Consult’s new survey found Hispanic approval of Biden’s handling of the economy has dropped to 42%, compared with 60% back in June. Ouch.

We told you a while back, and the mainstream media is finally catching up: Clueless Joe is Jimmy Carter reincarnated.

Perhaps most alarming for Biden, though, is his precipitous drop among independents. A recent Gallup poll shows that since June, his approval rating among with that key election-deciding group has fallen 21 point since June. That’s not an anomaly. That’s not a margin-of-error difference. That’s colossal. And a number that should really scare Democrats is this one from a recent Quinnipiac University poll: Indies are 56-38 in saying that the country is worse off than it was a year ago. If that number doesn’t improve significantly between now and next November’s midterm elections, the Democrats are toast in 2022.

Indies aren’t generally too fond of the Beltway or its denizens. And Joe Biden is the Beltway. As Kellyanne Conway put it, “[Independents] don’t like politicians to begin with. And they look at Joe Biden now, and they don’t see someone who’s able to leverage 47 years in Washington. They see someone who is a product of 47 years in Washington.”

“Does he care about people?” asks Conway. “Is he compassionate? Those are the personal attributes that pollsters like me look for. It’s always personal attributes and then policy metrics. He’s down all the way around. … He has no connective tissue.”

No connective tissue. Indeed.

Conway seems to think Joe Biden is running for a second term. We think she’s wrong. We’re not sure he’ll be able to finish out this term. Regardless, the Democrats have the remarkably unpopular Kamala Harris waiting in the wings, and she boasts the highest disapproval ratings of any vice president since polling of VPs began around half a century ago. As Conway says, “People will say that’s racism and sexism. Folks, it’s called eyesight and hearing.”

There’s no getting around it: Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have put our nation in a bad place, and the American people are awakening to that fact in ever growing numbers.

How low can Joe go? Stay tuned.


(Updated to include additional polling data from Rasmussen Reports.)

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