Biden is old and his approval rating is bad. Why are his reelection prospects still good?

To what should be nobody’s surprise, Biden has officially announced his reelection bid. Despite calls for him to not run again, virtually every single Democratic elected official is supporting him along with Democratic voters. The unity he has achieved is remarkable all on its own. While some on the left are upset over some moves he has made towards the center recently, they still remain firmly supportive of him.

I have long believed that Biden should run for reelection. The most obvious concern is his age. That is understandable and something Biden is trying to address. He is doing that simply by doing his job. He really seems to be having a blast. Just look at his trip to Ireland.

The other concern that is commonly voiced about his running for reelection is his approval rating. It still remains low and has barely budged in the last few months. If the problems he had were unique to him and another Democrat could take his place and be more popular that would be one thing. But the problems Biden faces are not unique to him. Inflation is still high and in general there is very little optimism about the present and future.

There is no point in speculating over which other Democrats could be strong contenders. That is something to start thinking about in four years. Biden has more than earned the right to run for reelection. His first two years saw significant legislative achievements despite the narrowest majority. To top it off, Democrats did amazingly well in the midterms when they should have been crushed.

The performance of the Democrats in the midterms is what makes me think that Biden is not only in a potentially strong position for reelection, but that his approval rating doesn’t tell the full story. A president’s approval rating is very significant. Unlike most things that are just noise, a president’s approval rating is very much a signal.

Traditionally, there has been a strong correlation between a president’s approval rating and how their party did in elections. That is to say a president’s approval rating tended to tell almost the entire story. Presidents whose approval ratings were even or better got reelected. Presidents whose approval ratings were underwater did not get reelected.

In Biden’s case, his approval rating seems to tell us much less than his predecessors’. The results of the midterms are the best piece of evidence for that. When the president has an approval rating below 50%, the party in the White House does horribly in midterms. That was the case for every such midterm until last year.

Since the midterms, there have been a handful of other elections held, where Democrats have continued to do well. Most notably, Democrats flipped control of the state supreme court in Wisconsin earlier this month. The week before that election, the gold standard of pollsters in Wisconsin found Biden’s approval rating to be at 39%. The Republican-aligned candidate should have won with those numbers, but lost decisively. There is clearly a significant number of people who disapprove of Biden, but are still voting for Democrats.

A recent poll taken by the Wall Street Journal shines some light on that phenomenon. It mostly tested the upcoming Republican primary, but also asked respondents whether they approved of the job Biden is doing. The results were very illuminating. On the surface, things look bad for Biden as his approval rating is only 42%. Digging deeper, however, gives a much more complicated picture.

Respondents were asked whether they strongly or somewhat approve/disapprove. Those who strongly disapproved said they were not going to support Biden against Trump or DeSantis, the only Republicans tested. However, those who somewhat disapproved were supportive of Biden. Biden’s approval rating is only 42%, but his support is at 49%, essentially even.

There are likely many explanations for why that disparity exists. Proving any one of them is difficult and hard to quantify, which is why polling doesn’t capture it. That is not a knock on polling. It is very much an art and assumptions necessarily have to be made when trying to get a representative sample. I have a lot of sympathy for pollsters. They provide an important service and are doing a job that is extraordinarily difficult and sometimes thankless.

When it comes to the approval-support disparity, one plausible explanation is that it stems from Biden having no cult of personality. Unlike many of his predecessors, he has no fanatical following. That should not be a surprise. He is very boring and has no charisma.

There seems to be a significant number of voters who disapprove of Biden only because of a lack of enthusiasm for him and not because they think he has done bad things as president. Whatever they tell pollsters, they still voted for Democrats last year. They will likely do the same next year.

Biden is not an electrifying speaker. He does well in face-to-face interactions, but is not going to fill up a football stadium. Nobody is going to wait in line for hours to see him. Unlike Obama, his getting elected president wasn’t historic. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t use social media and doesn’t crave being in the limelight all the time. He has been the most low profile president since TV became widely available.

All that makes it hard to be fanatically supportive of him. The flipside is that it makes hating him hard, too. The dislike congressional Republicans had for Clinton and Obama is just not there for Biden. They don’t like him as president, but every Republican in Congress who served with him when he was a senator likes him personally. That is probably why he got so much done on a bipartisan basis and I don’t think any other Democrat would have been able to do that.

As for the right-wing entertainers, they certainly don’t like Biden, but they have much juicier targets to go after. It doesn’t help that Biden doesn’t really fit any left-wing caricatures. Other Democrats and people on the left do and so that is who their targets for derision tend to be. Why talk about the boring octogenarian when you can be mad at drag queens and campus snowflakes?

While Biden’s age is seen by many as a liability, it has upsides. One is that it is much harder to find him threatening. It is much easier to be afraid a 46 year old (Clinton) or a 47 year old (Obama) than it is a 78 year old (Biden in 2020). Unlike Obama, Republicans never thought Biden was going to usher in an era of Democratic dominance. He was seen by many, not just Republicans, as a place holder who would quickly pass. He was too old to run again and would soon be forgotten. It’s hard to hate someone who you think poses no threat and will soon be gone.

Another upside of Biden’s age is that it lowers expectations of him. That was a huge error on Republicans’ part in 2020 that they still are making. By telling people that he is senile and in decline, it sets the bar for him at rock bottom. Republicans are unwittingly telling everyone to grade him on a curve. All Biden has to do now is complete a sentence and he looks amazing.

Have you seen the alternative?

The biggest explanation for why Biden and Democrats are in much better shape than approval rating polls suggest has nothing to do with them having any magic powers. It has everything to do with choices Republicans have made. One of Biden’s favorite lines is “Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” It looks like people are doing that and are finding the alternative to be much worse.

We just had the first midterm where the president had an approval rating below 50% and the party in the White House still did well. As I emphasized repeatedly after the election, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Republicans should have had a great night. The reason they didn’t has little to do with Biden and Democrats and a lot to do with them.

It is truly astonishing looking back at how badly Republicans screwed things up. In almost every key gubernatorial and senate race, they nominated candidates who were so toxic that they lost despite having almost every tailwind. Republicans even managed to lose state legislatures. The last time the party not in the White House lost state legislatures in a midterm was 1934. Republicans did all that with Biden having an approval rating in the low 40s. They pulled a rabbit out of a hat, only it was the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

What is it that made those candidates so toxic? They combined hardline policy positions, i.e., total abortion bans, with being personally revolting, i.e., cruelty, conspiracy theories. In race after race, toxic candidates lost elections that a normal Republican probably would have won. By normal, I don’t mean moderate. I just mean someone who isn’t a policy hardliner, doesn’t think the 2020 election was stolen and isn't a conspiracy theorist. That is an incredibly low bar that most of their candidates couldn’t even clear.

While abortion played a big role in the midterms (and in the elections since), that was always going to happen the second Roe was reversed. Republicans decided to nominate candidates who advocated for toxically unpopular total bans. In addition to abortion bans and election denial, many Republican candidates were just personally unlikeable. Examples of the latter include Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Herschel Walker and Doug Mastriano. A few Republican candidates were even in DC on January 6.

Despite high inflation and deep pessimism about where things are headed, voters in key races decided that Republican candidates were so repulsive that they voted for Democrats. While midterm and presidential elections are completely different things, there is no reason to think Republicans’ toxicity will wear off next year. Depending on who their nominee is, it could be less of a problem or it could be even worse for them.

Obviously, if Trump is nominated, he will be toxic. He won’t have the luxury of being a shiny new object that everyone wants to see nor will be the incumbent. He will be the challenger against the incumbent and will be even more unhinged than he was in 2020. That doesn’t mean he can’t win, but it makes his odds lower than they otherwise would be.

It is way too early to say how any other Republican would fare, but none of the ones who are or will be running are without significant liabilities. Almost every one of them has a record of voting or advocating for unpopular cuts to entitlement programs. While most have been purposefully vague on abortion, they will probably have to take a position on it sooner or later that will likely be unpopular. If they refuse to articulate their position on it, Democrats will do that for them.

While there is plenty of time to recover, DeSantis is not looking so good right now. Between his signing a ban on abortion after 6 weeks and waffling on Ukraine, he has not helped himself lately. His crusade against Disney makes him look monomaniacal. He can’t finish a sentence without saying the word woke. Members of the Florida congressional delegation have been endorsing Trump with one of them saying that DeSantis has never reached out to him during his time in office or returned his calls. That seems to be a pattern with him.

Trump has been attacking DeSantis from the left lately. He has attacked his voting record in Congress, which is way out in right field. As a congressman, DeSantis voted multiple times to privatize Medicare, chop up Medicaid and repeal the Affordable Care Act. He has previously supported privatizing Social Security. If he is the nominee next year, all of those things will be used against him.

What I’m getting at with all this is not that Biden is invincible. There is way too much polarization today for landslide wins to happen. Anyone who is the nominee of a major party for president certainly has a much greater than 0% chance of winning. Things could go wrong for Biden such as a recession. As much as I think he is capable of campaigning and has shown he can do the job, he will be 81 next year and it’s not uncommon to have a decline in health at that age.

Those risks notwithstanding, Biden is in much better shape than his topline approval numbers would suggest. With abortion being a highly salient issue, Republicans having unpopular economic ideas and the potential for them to nominate someone toxic, he has a lot going for him. By extension, that means Democrats have a lot going for them, too, as their fortunes are linked.

Should Democrats want Trump to be nominated?

There has been a discussion among various pundits, writers, strategists and others about (a) whether Democrats are rooting for Trump in the primary and (b) whether that is wise. It reminds me of the arguments last year about the wisdom and hypocrisy of Democrats spending money in Republican primaries to boost far right candidates. It may be fun to argue over, but it has no relevance to whether Trump gets nominated next year.

If Trump is nominated again it will be because Republican primary voters chose him. What Democrats want or don’t want doesn’t matter one bit. Democrats will not be voting in Republican primaries. Many non-Trump Republicans love to get mad about Democrats supposedly rooting for Trump. It might make them feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem, which is that Republican primary voters like Trump. They like him because they choose to, not because Democrats tell them to.

For those interested, a case for why Democrats should want DeSantis (or any non-Trump Republican) to win the primary next year can be found here. I think it is right although that is the soft bigotry of low expectations if there was ever such a thing. Having a DeSantis presidency would be awful, but Trump is so uniquely unfit for the job and dangerous that he has to be kept away from it.

That is all I’m going to say about that debate. It doesn’t matter what I think because I won’t be voting in the Republican primary next year. If anyone reading this is a Democrat and is considering voting in a Republican primary to vote against Trump, that’s a bad idea. Do everything you can to help Biden and other Democrats next year. Let Republicans decide for themselves what they are going to do.

A few Democrats trying to vote against Trump in Republican primaries won’t make any difference. You only have one vote in the primary. Don’t waste it on a lost cause.

Would I be worried that Trump could win if he is nominated? Absolutely. Do I think he would win? I think it's unlikely absent a bad recession or some other kind of catastrophe. If he talked about real issues and stopped obsessing over 2020 he might be formidable, but if he did that he wouldn’t be Trump.

As I mentioned earlier, midterms are very different from presidential elections. Still, the midterms last year showed that there is a substantial number of swing voters in key states who are anti-Trump above all else. Whatever their qualms with Biden and Democrats are, their opposition to Trump and his ilk takes precedence over that.

It is true there are many people who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 who didn’t vote last year. Many of them will vote for him next year if he is nominated. But that cuts both ways. There are many others who will vote for Biden next year who didn’t vote last year. Who will wind up benefitting from that on net is unknown right now.

While Trump will do well with white working class voters, he may not do as well as he has before. Some may just be tired of him and his inability to move past 2020. Others, especially in the midwest, may vote for Democrats because of abortion. There is no precedent for a presidential election where abortion is a major national issue and the stakes are real. As the old saying goes, may you live in interesting times.