It’s the worst since 2011, which means not only is it worse than at any point during Trump’s presidency, it’s worse than at any point during a pandemic that killed a million people.
Dan McLaughlin sums it up thusly: “Pollsters: how do you feel about America under Joe Biden? Americans: literally a global plague was better than this.”
What the hell was going on in this country in late 2011 that made voters (slightly) more sour about the future then than they are now amid grinding inflation, lingering COVID, and bitter partisan divisions?
If it’s any consolation to Dems, the only other time in the history of RealClearPolitics’s tracker that the numbers were this bad came during the first term of a Democratic president who went on to get reelected comfortably the following year.
I have a feeling that the bad vibes will linger longer during Biden’s administration, though, and not just because of inflation. Have a look at the right track/wrong track numbers over the past year:
The first sharp drop in the “right track” share came last August, following the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco. That was followed by eight months of stasis, then by another drop in May presumably due to rising gas prices and growing concerns about the cost of living. But look how much altitude the “right track” share has lost in just the past two weeks, from 22.8 percent on June 28 to 17.9 percent today. Did anything happen in late June to suddenly cause liberals who’d stuck by Biden until that point to suddenly turn dark about which track the country was on?
Inflation will end in the next year or two (I think?) but national abortion rights won’t be returning to America anytime soon. The resulting progressive disaffection will remain a problem for Biden for the rest of his term. And, as with inflation, there’s little he can do to try to solve it.
He makes a great scapegoat for pissed-off lefties, though!
One Democratic strategist bemoaned to DailyMail.com that ‘this White House is just always like a half step behind.’
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‘Be the effing president,’ the strategist said of Biden…
‘Progressives want all the change, the vast majority of the country just wants to get to some semblance of normal again, moderates are tired of the progressives being detached from independent voters, and everyone wants [Attorney General] Merrick Garland to empanel grand juries yesterday,’ [another] strategist said.
‘With inflation, January 6th, Russia invading Ukraine, the Supreme Court imposing cultural shocks, and the new Omicron variants all dominating the first half of this term, it makes it really hard to make anybody happy,’ the strategist said.
What kind of wave are we looking at this fall, exactly? Short answer: A big one.
Governor:
Drazan – 32.4%
Kotek – 31.4%
Johnson – 24.4%Generic Ballot:
GOP – 47.1%
Dem – 42.5% https://t.co/yV8cK991U5— Jeremy Hughes (@jeremybhughes) July 7, 2022
Longer answer: A big one, but probably not as big as some expect. Remember, Biden’s garbage numbers are to some degree independent of Democratic interest in turning out this fall, which looks to have risen since the Dobbs decision. And remorseless gerrymandering over the last decade has shrunk the number of competitive seats. Years ago, before Americans began sorting themselves geographically by their politics, an 80-seat pick-up in the House in an environment like this one might be feasible. In 2022, writes Amy Walter, a 35- or 40-seat pick-up is more realistic.
Walter notes that enormous wave elections tend to happen when a rump minority in the House suddenly surges into power, winning back dozens of competitive seats they had lost in poor previous cycles. But the current House GOP isn’t a rump minority; they gained seats in the last congressional elections in 2020, in fact. Incumbents have also gotten used to an endless series of tit-for-tat wave elections, she points out, which means they’re less likely than they were in the past to take victory for granted. Case in point: Patty Murray is a five-term Senate incumbent running in one of America’s most reliably blue states but she’s taking no chances this year, having already spent more than a million bucks on ads attacking her Republican challenger.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proved a few years ago that it’s still possible to catch an incumbent napping when she successfully primaried Joe Crowley. But it’s harder in a general election in an era of waves, when figures like Murray know that being proactive in defending their seats may be the difference between defeat and victory.
But don’t be too glum about Walter’s projection. Even if Republicans gained a “mere” 41 seats, that would leave them north of 250 in the House — their biggest majority since before the New Deal. That’s what a sub-18 percent “right track” number will do to a party in power.
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