Democrats are increasingly stressed about President Joe Biden’s bad poll numbers. And for a good reason: the party-in-power’s performance in mid-terms is often impacted by how voters feel about the economy and how they feel about the President. Neither are good seven months before the 2022 mid-terms.
Democrats are growing increasingly worried about President Biden’s standing in the polls seven months out from the midterm elections.
Biden hasn’t seen a boost in his approval ratings amid Russia’s war in Ukraine despite support among Americans for the steps that he has taken.
While the economy continues to gain jobs and the unemployment rate is low, something Biden touted on Friday, inflation is at a 40-year high and gas prices are through the roof, exacerbated by the Russian invasion.
Democrats for months have feared they will lose the House majority this fall, and they are worried about losing the Senate, too, with polls showing Biden performing poorly in key states such as Arizona.
Democrats are growing increasingly worried about President Biden’s standing in the polls seven months out from the midterm elections.
Biden hasn’t seen a boost in his approval ratings amid Russia’s war in Ukraine despite support among Americans for the steps that he has taken.
While the economy continues to gain jobs and the unemployment rate is low, something Biden touted on Friday, inflation is at a 40-year high and gas prices are through the roof, exacerbated by the Russian invasion.
Democrats for months have feared they will lose the House majority this fall, and they are worried about losing the Senate, too, with polls showing Biden performing poorly in key states such as Arizona.
And:
“It’s bad,” said one Democratic strategist. “You have an energy crisis that’s paralyzing and inflation is at a 40-year high and we’re heading into a recession. The problem is simple. The American people have lost confidence in him.”
The news from the job market on Friday was that the U.S. economy added 431,000 jobs in March, more signs of a strong economy. Yet those figures have not translated into a boost for Biden.
“My hypothesis is that, unless and until inflation comes down appreciably, that there’s going to be a ceiling on his job approval that’s a lot lower than the White House wants it to be,” said Bill Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program and a former domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.
Biden initially appeared to receive a slight bump in support after his State of the Union address, where he forcefully rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war in Ukraine that had been launched less than a week before.
Biden’s numbers have remained anemic due to high gas prices. The White House announced the U.S. will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from its strategic reserves to help cut gas prices and fight inflation–but that’s unlikely to create the kind of highly dramatic gas price decrease that would check-mate voter ire on the cost at the pump.
Meanwhile, American politics is dominated today by intense political polarization which perhaps can be more accurately described as intense political tribalism. Many American’s have political perspectives locked into unshakeable perceptions.
And Democrats face another problem: a problem: the party’s base.
I’ve often noted how during some key moments in political history many Democrats become angry at or disappointed in their party so some Democrats decide not to vote to teach their party a lesson. Then after the party loses the Congress or the Presidency and the party is taught a lesson many Democrats spend the next few years complaining about Republicans, who they helped put in power by staying home.
Democrats are desperately trying to understand what’s roiling the electorate heading into a brutal midterm environment.
HIT Strategies has been conducting weekly focus groups to find out in real time how Americans are processing events in 2022. On Monday night we watched discussions with two different subgroups of partisan Democrats assembled by the firm: “Black Base, Always vote for Dems, Ages 25+” and “Youth Base; Always vote for Dems, Ages 25 – 39.”
There were significant differences within and between the two groups of nine voters. But there were some broad takeaways:
— A preoccupation with inflation and crime.
— Exhaustion with pandemic restrictions.
— Cynicism about politics.
— Deep frustration that President JOE BIDEN and Democrats have failed to deliver on their early promises.
— Sympathy for Ukraine mixed with a lack of enthusiasm for Biden spending too much time and money on the issue.
— Ambiguity about how important Jan. 6 should be for Democrats in the midterms.These sentiments are captured in recent polling: Biden’s decline in approval from Black voters and millennials has been well documented, as of course has the rise in importance of inflation, crime and pandemic fatigue.
But watching the three-and-a-half hours of conversations, you notice a yawning gap between what Democrats here in D.C. are saying and what their most loyal voters are experiencing outside the Beltway. This was especially true on two big issues:
The economy: A cottage industry of White House officials and left-wing media critics who talk to each other on Twitter has convinced themselves that the media is responsible for the public’s overwhelming focus on the bad news of inflation rather than the good news of low unemployment and rising wages. The focus groups exploded that bit of Democratic self-deception.
When the voters were asked to describe how they feel about how things are going, they responded with words like “exhausted,” “uptight,” “unsure,” “concerned” and “anxious.”
A woman from the Boston area who went first mentioned rising gas and food prices, food shortages at her local Whole Foods, and the increasing cost of housing. “It just seems like everything is going up and there’s no end in sight,” she said.
In the other focus group, a Black man from the Houston area talked about trying to subsist on the $12- and $13-per-hour jobs he was being offered. “No one can live off of that, especially with inflation,” he said.And so it went across hours of hours of conversation. Rising costs — of food, gas, education, medication and more — dominated.
Read the entire Politico story for more details.
But the one fact is this:
While things can shift abruptly in America’s often hyperactive politics, none of this looks good for Democrats heading into the mid-terms.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.