Joe Biden’s momentary May plunge in the heretofore-friendly Reuters tracking poll looked like a fluke. His initial rebound afterward now looks more suspect in the weeks following his flirtation with rock bottom. The latest iteration of the Reuters poll has Biden landing again at the worst points of both approval and disapproval as Democrats appear to be souring on their president:
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating held at the lowest level of his presidency, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll completed on Wednesday.
Thirty-six percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of his job, according to the two-day public opinion poll. That’s down slightly from 38% a week earlier and matched the record low first hit in late May.
The president’s approval rating has stayed below 50% since August, a warning sign that his Democratic Party could lose control of at least one chamber of the U.S. Congress in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
The Reuters report doesn’t note the specific result on disapproval, but it’s 59%. That means Biden has returned to the 36/59 rating that first looked like an outlier in the Reuters tracking poll, a series that had been rather friendly to Biden until that point. Two weeks ago, Biden nearly hit the same point with a 36/58 rating, but bounced back up slightly to 38/57, presumably a reaction to the Dobbs decision and/or a slight lessening of gas prices.
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All of these changes are within the margins of error, but not the overall decline since the beginning of June. At that point, Biden was still at 42/52, more or less on the same track as he had been with Reuters, where their approval-rating trend showed the same direction as other pollsters but with significantly less amplitude — until now. In five weeks, Biden has gone from -10 in the gap to -23, which is clearly not an MoE issue or statistical noise.
What caused the drop? Biden’s base is beginning to move away from him. He’s now down to 69/30 among Democrats, the worst approval reading among his own party in the Reuters series. It’s similar to what we saw in the latest Civiqs tracking poll as well, where Biden got a 64/16 among Democrats, along with 20% who proffered no opinion on Biden’s job performance. It’s evidence that the confidence-crisis cascade that began with Biden’s craven abandonment of Afghanistan and Americans in it has spread to his own party.
It may not be a majority opinion among Democrats yet, but 30-36% discontent in the base is disastrous for Democrats midterm prospects. A significant number of those may vote Republican in protest, but more will simply choose not to vote at all. This kind of ennui has a deleterious effect in recruiting organizers and volunteers for GOTV efforts too, before and on Election Day, not to mention grassroots fundraising efforts.
I’ll have more on issues in a later post, but I’ll just note here that Reuters shows the economy by far and away the biggest issue for Americans — 33% overall, 42% among Republicans, and even tops among Democrats at 24%. Reuters either didn’t specifically ask about abortion or it didn’t come up, but it’s worth noting that crime and the environment tie for second among Democrats at less than half of those choosing the economy (10%), and “healthcare” comes in a distant eighth at 5%.
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