How long will it be until Biden sees an approval number in the high thirties? If the trend holds, it shouldn’t take much longer than January to see approval below forty percent. As it stands today, a new NPR/Marist poll gives Biden a 41% approval rating, which is down another percentage point from their previous month’s poll. The numbers just keep dropping, and a surge of Covid cases and continued inflation are driving the numbers downward. At some point, it has to be asked just many lives will be put in the hands of Biden the same way the media tried to paint every Covid death as the fault of Donald Trump?
Biden will deliver his Covid address today around 2:30 pm ET, you can watch it here via YouTube.
The numbers keep getting uglier for this administration, which is perhaps what precipitated the need for an address to the nation:
A new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll released Monday showed Biden’s approval rating at 41 percent, a new low for the survey.
By contrast, 55 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance, including 44 percent who say they “strongly disapprove” of the 46th president.
The number of respondents who said they “strongly disapproved” of the president was up six percentage points from the most recent Marist poll, published Dec. 9.
Monday’s survey presents almost a mirror image of Marist’s findings from mid-May, when 53 percent approved of Biden’s work while 41 percent disapproved.
Part of this is drop is driven by the record inflation report that came out in early December. It’s not surprising to see Biden’s numbers get even softer as blow after blow just keeps coming for an administration caught flat-footed on inflation and, apparently, Covid-19 variants, despite warnings on both.
The good news, which sounds like a broken record now, is that numbers this low mean there is lots of room for improvement. The problem is that Biden can’t get traction on literally any issue facing the country. The economy is very shaky with prices continuing to rise into next year, as some economists suggest, and the Covid situation seems almost more out of control right now than it did in March of 2020.
The issues behind the top-line numbers are the usual suspects. Pandemic fatigue, mistrust of Biden’s leadership, and a general concern of malaise over the economy:
“There’s lots of uncertainty out there,” Marist College Institute of Public Opinion director Lee Miringoff told PBS. “He’s being hit for lack of leadership. He’s being hit for the fatigue of the pandemic and concerns about inflation.”
The poll showed Biden underwater among respondents of every household income, age and racial demographic. Perhaps most alarmingly for the White House and congressional Democrats, 65 percent of Latinos said they disapproved of Biden’s job performance, while just 33 percent said they approved.
Similarly, nearly two-thirds of self-described independents (66 percent) said they disapproved of Biden’s efforts, while just 29 percent approved.
“Uncertainty” should probably be the word of the year for 2021. Just when it felt like things were returning to some kind of normal, when Biden foolishly declared Covid defeated back in July, then it came roaring back in the new Delta variant causing mayhem. Now months later, another new variant causing similar mayhem in Omicron. We’re back to reporting Covid cases and treating them the same as Covid deaths, which of course is hyperbole at its best.
It’s unclear what if anything Biden can say to the nation tonight to ease fears and provide leadership that people can believe in. He will almost assuredly take an extremely hostile and patronizing tone toward anyone choosing not to be vaccinated against Covid-19, as evidenced by earlier White House communications on the subject.
The numbers are so bad that he has to do something, and a speech directly to the country is one thing a president can do to break through the noise and try to assure a weary nation that someone is in charge and watching over the ship. The issue there is that very few people trust whether Biden is capable of such a task because everything the Biden-Harris administration has touched is falling apart.
