David Lauter
Sun, December 17, 2023 at 4:33 PM CST·6 min read
President Biden’s standing in polls is bad — generating panic among many Democrats and a raft of theories about what’s wrong.
He’s too conservative, say progressives; too liberal, according to centrists.
And, of course, nearly everyone mentions his age.
But what if all of that misses the real story? What if the main problem Biden faces isn’t Biden at all?
Biden is 81. No question that’s a problem politically. But if age were the sole driver of poll standing, what would explain the position of 51-year-old Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? His current approval rating — 31%, according to Canada’s Angus Reid Institute — makes Biden’s 38% in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of polls look almost balmy.
One could argue that Trudeau is a special case: He recently began his ninth year in office and may have worn out his welcome.
But if so, what is there to say about British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? He’s been in office barely a year, and just 21% of Britons are satisfied with the job he’s doing, according to the latest Ipsos poll. The opposition Labor Party leads Sunak’s Conservatives 41%-24% in a hypothetical look at the next British election, which Sunak must call by January 2025.
Maybe Sunak’s problem is that his party has run out of steam after 13 years in power under five prime ministers. But that wouldn’t explain the travails of Germany’s Olaf Scholz. The governing coalition of his Social Democratic party, the Green party and the Free Democrats took power just two years ago. Only 17% of Germans approve of how they are doing, according to a new poll by Germany’s public broadcasting network.
Scholz, of course, suffers from the fallout of the war in Ukraine, which has strained his coalition and driven up prices in Germany. But that doesn’t explain the poor position of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose approval rating dropped this week to a new low of 17%.
I could go on, but by now, the point should be clear: Around the world, leaders of wealthy, developed nations are struggling with poor approval ratings. For each one, there are individual factors often cited to explain their problems — age, lengthy tenure, domestic policy disagreements, a financial scandal in Japan. Those factors are all real and have an impact.
But stand back and look at the overall pattern, and it’s hard not to conclude that something larger is at work.
A similar pattern emerges if we look at the approval ratings of presidents over the last 70 years.
Starting with President Eisenhower and running through President George H.W. Bush, American leaders for 40 years spent most of their tenure with approval ratings above 50%. The periods when presidents dropped below 50% corresponded to major national traumas — escalation of the Vietnam War in the last few years of President Johnson’s tenure, the Watergate scandal for President Nixon and the Iran hostage crisis for President Carter.
The last 20 years — since President George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 — shows the mirror image: Except for brief periods, including honeymoons at the beginning of their tenures, none of the presidents since then have popped above 50% for a sustained time. President Trump never got majority approval in his entire four years in office; Biden was above 50% for his initial months but soon dropped below.
As with the international comparison, one can pick out individual reasons why each president has failed to gain majority support, but the persistent pattern suggests a larger explanation.
The potential explanation isn’t a secret: Presidents like Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval during a period of sustained and widely shared economic growth that raised living standards for most Americans. Not long after that persistent growth gave way to income stagnation and rising inequality, the comfortable approval ratings for presidents became a thing of the past.
Globally, middle-income countries have seen big increases in living standards in the last couple of decades, and abject poverty around the world has declined a lot, but average living standards in many wealthy countries have plateaued.
Income stagnation isn’t the only problem wealthy countries have faced. High levels of immigration have brought enormous benefits and dynamism but have also increased social tension. Countries such as Japan, which resisted immigration, have suffered from rapid aging of their populations as birthrates declined. Changing gender roles and cultural diversity have brought more equality — and backlashes.
Those factors contributed to a sharp decline in the belief that political leaders are looking out for the interests of average citizens.
Trust in government has fallen in the U.S. as the share of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track rose, and partisan lines have hardened. All that leads to lower job approval for presidents.
Layer on top of that the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I wrote recently, a lot of Americans have tried to put the pandemic behind them and have stopped talking about it. But the trauma it caused worldwide won’t go away so easily: We remain a society in recovery.
The fact that Biden shares his unpopularity with other leaders doesn’t make his difficulties any less real. The comparison with others should, however, make people a bit more skeptical of the belief that some other Democrat would do significantly better. If the underlying reality in all these countries is that unhappy voters punish whichever party is in power, then replacing Biden with someone else won’t necessarily solve anything.
Nonetheless, Biden does face serious difficulties, as the numbers from a new survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center show.
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In Pew’s survey, just one-third of Americans approved of Biden’s job performance, and 64% disapproved. His standing has dropped significantly since the beginning of the year, especially among his fellow Democrats: Biden’s approval within his party has dropped from 73% late last year to just 61% now, Pew found.
Restiveness on the left — over the Israel-Hamas war, in particular — has gotten a lot of attention, but the Pew numbers suggest that’s not the main source of Biden’s troubles. Among Democrats who describe themselves as liberal, 66% approve of his performance; among those who identify as moderate or conservative 57% do.
Former President Obama went through a similar, although less deep, decline in support among fellow Democrats at this point in his presidency. He succeeded in rallying Democrats, in part by depicting his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, as a plutocrat unsympathetic to the problems of ordinary Americans.
White House aides have made no secret of their plan to try to do likewise by focusing voters on Trump’s faults, and the former president has a knack for reminding voters of what they dislike about him. Once he’s more consistently in the spotlight, that’s likely to make a difference.
But Biden and his allies shouldn’t count on incumbency, itself, to deliver a victory: These days, it’s no longer clear that it’s even an advantage.
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