Why are Joe Biden's approval ratings dropping, and what could it mean?

US President Joe Biden turned 79 on November 20, 2021. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

US President Joe Biden turned 79 yesterday, November 20, 2021. He also completed 10 months in office. But this has not been a very good time for the oldest man to have been elected president of the United States.

The results from three opinion polls published last week should have him worried. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found his approval rating to be 41%, with 53% saying they disapprove, and as many as 44% “strongly disapproving”.

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll pegged the approval at 38%, with 59% disapproving. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents do not want Biden to run for president again, including 39% of those who voted for him last year. And in a Politico-Morning Consult survey, only 46% thought he is “mentally fit” for his job, with 48% disagreeing.

The reasons could be many. Covid is still raging in the US. The number of new Covid cases remains above 100,000 a day, with deaths at over 1,000. This, of course, has much to do with a large number of Americans refusing to get vaccinated, but Biden’s attempt to bulldoze this resistance received a body blow a few days ago, when an appeals court blocked his executive order requiring all companies with more than 100 workers to make vaccination mandatory for employees.

Inflation is at a three-decade high. Prices are surging, from eggs to petrol to washing machines. Strangely enough, this is because the US economy has staged a remarkable recovery since the worst days of the pandemic. Fuelled by massive government spending and fiscal stimulus, demand has soared and companies, which did not expect it to happen so fast, have been left with inadequate stocks and manpower.

Ports and freight yards are unable to handle the traffic. Supply chains are clogged. Firms are passing on their increased costs to customers.

The hasty pull-out from Afghanistan has been a big embarrassment. Biden may deny that it was a defeat and a surrender to the Taliban, but not many people are buying that. There was near-total public support for the US winding down its 20-year war, but the frantic manner of the exit has rankled. There are possibly still several hundred US citizens trapped in Afghanistan with no clarity on when and how they can be evacuated.

Biden won the Democratic Party nomination for presidential candidate because he was more acceptable than the openly socialist Bernie Sanders, and the biggest reason he won the election for president was quite simply that he was not the malign Donald Trump. A Washington fixture for 49 years, first as senator and then Barrack Obama’s vice-president, he was seen as a consensus-maker who would not do anything rash.

But as president, Biden appears to have embraced the “progressive” policies of Sanders—big government, large doles, harsh environmental policies and general wokeness. A backlash could be brewing.

An obvious area of discontent is illegal migration. In fiscal year 2021—1 October 2020 to 30 September 2021 (Biden was elected on 6 November 2020)—the US Border Patrol encountered 1,662,167 people, roughly double the pre-pandemic-year total and four times the number for the pandemic year. For October, the tally was 186,672; the migrant tide may be growing stronger.

The administration has continuously been sending mixed signals on the issue. But numbers do not lie—the migrants clearly believe they have a very good chance under Biden of not being deported if they can sneak in.

The results of the recent election for the post of the governor of Virginia would have come as a shock to Biden and the Democratic Party. Virginia has generally favoured Democrats for more than 100 years and in the last presidential election, Biden won it by a clear 10 points over Trump. But now Glenn Youngkin, a political newbie Republican, has defeated Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

This, after Biden and Obama actively campaigned on the ground for McAuliffe. And Democratic Party leaders now seem sharply divided on why he lost—whether his platform was “too progressive” or “too moderate” for Virginians.

About a year from now, the US will see elections to its Congress—all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 Senate seats. Currently, the Democrats have a slim majority in the House and the Senate is split 50-50 with vice-president Kamala Harris holding a casting vote.

But last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll finds that nationwide, Republicans are leading Democrats in the Congressional ballot by 51% to 41%. If the Democratic Party loses both the House and the Senate next year, Biden will have great difficulty pushing through his policies.

His 79^th birthday may not have been a very happy one for the American president.