Sometimes you just have to state the obvious and one month before the midterms is a good time to do that. This afternoon, CNN’s Chris Cillizza has a new analysis piece up noting that President Biden’s polling is still awful despite a lot of media hype about a surge of support this summer.
Here’s the thing that all of that happy talk misses: Biden is still not at all popular among the public…
In new CNN polling in Arizona and Nevada, Biden’s job approval rating among registered voters sits at 39% in both states. His disapproval in both states is 60%. Which, bad.
But it’s not anomalous. In CNN’s Poll of Polls, the average of the most recent national polls of adults that meet CNN’s standards for reporting, Biden’s approval is at – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – 39%.
Cillizza then looks at Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Center and compares where Biden is now to where previous presidents were at this same moment in time, i.e. a month before the midterms. Gallup’s numbers are a bit different and have Biden at 42% but that still turns out to be lower than all but one former president in the past 30 years. That president being Trump.
Trump was at 40% at around the same time so not far below where Biden is now. And that comparison doesn’t really convey just how close. Here’s a Gallup chart showing Biden’s numbers in green and Trump’s as a dashed blue line. It’s really close. I’m not sure what the margin of error is on these polls but I’m guessing this is within it.
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And that leads Cillizza to his conclusion which is clearly such bad news that his analysis could only go up Friday afternoon at 6:34 PM:
In the 2018 election, Democrats won a net of 40 House seats – and took the majority. Which is consistent with what history tells us about the price the president’s party pays when said president is not popular with Americans.
As of 2018 – and not including the 2018 election – the average House seat loss for a president whose job approval is under 50% is 37 seats, according to a Gallup analysis.
In sum, there is every reason to think Democrats are about to get clobbered in the midterms. For anything other than that to happen when Biden is at 39% in major polls would be a minor miracle.
For the record, I agree with Cillizza analysis. It’s a very safe conclusion based on historical results. Unfortunately, the fate of the Senate in particular is going to turn on some individual races where some of the GOP candidate are, shall we say, struggling. That doesn’t mean the GOP won’t pull this out. There has been some good news lately on this front, espeicially in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin. But it’s going to be a lot tighter than it probably should be based on Joe Biden’s terrible polling.
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