The Daily - How Biden’s Approval Rating Got So Low

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

During his campaign for president and in his first year in office, Joe Biden tried to be all things to all people. But trying to govern on behalf of such a broad political coalition has left his administration with something of an identity crisis.In alarming figures for Democrats ahead of the midterms, Mr. Biden’s approval rating has reached the lowest level of his presidency, while 70 percent of Americans say that the country is on the wrong track.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Confidential polling data obtained by The Times highlights the biggest challenges for Mr. Biden and his party in this election year.The $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief law unleashed a giant wave of spending on local construction projects and programs. But Democratic candidates aren’t getting much credit for it.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. You know, it's hard to believe that in less than just 12 months, Joe Biden's popularity has absolutely crumbled. New polling shows that President Biden's approval rating has reached the lowest level of his presidency. President Biden's poll numbers are absolutely horrifically bad.

Just as his party gears up for midterm elections that rarely go well for the party in power. What Biden's declining popularity is going to mean for the prospects for Democrats heading into that election, where there's a very good chance the Democrats are going to lose the House, the Senate, possibly both. I spoke with my colleague, Alex Burns, about the moments, seen and unseen, that led Biden and the Democrats to this precarious place and the kind of campaigns that Democratic candidates are now waging as a result. It's Wednesday, June 22nd. Wednesday, June 22nd.

Alex, it is not exactly a secret that Democrats are expected to do quite poorly in this fall's midterm elections, but the polling can still take your breath away. A few days ago, USA Today asked Americans about their views of President Biden, the face of the Democratic Party, and found that his approval rating was 39%. So less than four out of 10 Americans approve of the president and his handling of the job. And beyond that, seven in 10 Americans, 70% say that the country is on the wrong track. And very alarmingly, if you're a Democrat, the poll revealed a lot of pessimism among Democrats, not just Republicans or independents. So just a gut check, am I correct in thinking of these numbers as being very bad for the party in control in an election year? You're not wrong, Michael. These are terrible

numbers for an incumbent party heading into a midterm election that is almost always a referendum on the party in power. Those numbers among Democrats that you cited where the president's own base feels so, to use a clinical term, just bummed out about the state of the country. It's really hard to take that kind of mood and mobilize your own side with the force that you need in order to be truly competitive. Well, lucky for us, you have just finished writing a book that tries to understand in part how Democrats got to this point. This book, This Will Not Pass, which is pretty much an investigation into the last several years in America's political life. You co-wrote it with our colleague, Jonathan Martin. And so how did the Democrats get to this point where the president's approval

rating and the right track, wrong track numbers are so bad. Michael, when you look at where Democrats find themselves today, you can see the political drag of inflation. You see the political drag of gas prices in particular. You see the long hangover from the withdrawal from Afghanistan and other sort of issue-specific political headaches for Biden. But when you take a step back from that, you see fundamental weakness in Biden's political coalition from the start, and then a series of strategic miscalculations or errors that add up over time to weaken his position as president. Going back to the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden tried to build the broadest possible coalition against Donald Trump. And he did it by doing two big things at the same time.

One was talking to voters in the political center and even the center right and saying, I'm the candidate of normalcy. I will bring back capable, conventional government. And then he talks to people on the left and within the base of the Democratic Party and says, I'm going to be a transformative president. We are not just going to beat Donald Trump and then go back to business as usual. We're going to beat Donald Trump. And then we are going to change this country from top to bottom to make it a fairer, more just country on every level that you, the progressive base of the Democratic Party, cares about. And for people paying close attention at the time, there was always real attention. These are not consistent messages, right?

They're not consistent messages. But he succeeds in mobilizing a muscular majority coalition that runs the gamut from 19-year-old former Bernie Sanders canvassers on the left to former George W. Bush cabinet officials on the right. And that succeeds in beating Trump. But during the campaign, it's always clear that Biden is eventually going to have to make some choices. He's going to need to let somebody down. He's going to need to talk straight to one or multiple major constituencies who are not going to get quite what they bargained for when he becomes president. And what you see over and over again,

until the end of his first year as president, I think you could argue even to today, is a real resistance to choosing, is a real sort of identity crisis within the Biden presidency where he never quite wants to abandon either version of President Biden that he has promised to the country. And what he ends up doing instead of disappointing some people is disappointing almost everyone. And what he ends up doing instead of disappointing some people is disappointing almost everyone. Right. In this book, you and Jonathan studied the moments where the president basically chose not to choose. So tell us about the first of those moments that you identified. The same night that Biden is elected president, Democrats take a real beating in the House. They don't lose control, but their majority becomes very, very thin. And remember, at this point, Democrats have still not won control of the Senate because there are those two outstanding runoff elections in Georgia that won't be decided for more than a month. So when these leaders of the incoming

Democratic government gather in Delaware, they're trying to figure out how can we possibly get a coronavirus relief bill done under these circumstances? Are we going to be able to get anything meaningful done at all, given that Mitch McConnell may wind up in control of the Senate. And in that meeting in Delaware in November, Chuck Schumer goes to Biden and says, the way you got to confront this is you got to go big. You need to propose something big and daring and eye-catching enough that you are going to attract public support for this, that you're going to mobilize the electorate. So what he does is he presses forward with an absolutely massive relief package, $1.9 trillion. It includes vaccine money, aid to states and cities, generous relief checks to individual families and households, and he gets

it through. Why does this end up mattering so much in our understanding of the president and his sense of whether he's going to be the uniter, the guy who just makes the country work again versus a potentially transformational leader of the United States? Well, I think what it does in those first months of the Biden presidency is it emboldens him in this idea that he can be all of the above. In the view of Biden and his advisors, it's hugely encouraging in their overall political theory of the case, which is if we come in and we show the country that we really are as competent as we say we are, and we show that we can deliver concrete, generous benefits for the average person, bring back the economy, whip the coronavirus, then momentum is going to build

on itself. And the country will reward us, and our political hand will only get stronger the more we do. Right. And again, no decision will have to be made about letting down progressives, about big change, or letting down moderates who say, we just elected you to make sure the car doesn't drive into a ditch. Right. And it sure seems in that moment like that coalition they put together in 2020, from the center right to the far left, like maybe it's actually holding together. And when does that start to change? I stand here tonight, one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. It's when you get a little bit deeper into the spring of 2021. 100 days ago, America's house was on fire. We had to act. house was on fire. We had to act. And you start to turn to issues beyond COVID and beyond the immediate economic catastrophe that the country is coming out of. After 100 days of rescue and

renewal, America is ready for a takeoff, in my view. And Biden is now in a place, and his party is in a place, where it has to decide what to do next and how to sequence and prioritize the spending of its political capital. America's moving, moving forward, but we can't stop now. of split-brain Democratic Party that we've been talking about that is, on the one hand, party of mainstream unifiers, on the other hand, party of ambitious social and economic reformers and transformers. Biden and his party decide to try to split those agendas into two. Throughout our history, if you think about it, public investment in infrastructure has literally transformed America. So that over here on one side, Biden is going to negotiate with centrist Democrats and Republicans

on issues of common interest like infrastructure. A once-in-a-generation investment in America itself. And over here on the other side. We also need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children. to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children. He is going to negotiate within the Democratic Party on issues that Republicans have no interest in, like broadening and deepening the social safety net, raising taxes on the wealthy, like climate change, police reform, immigration, etc. So that's what they try to do. We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works and we can deliver for our people.

They launched two separate sets of talks with largely two separate sets of people. And key to all of this is keeping the two tracks truly separate. What Biden and Democratic leaders quickly find in the spring heading into the early summer of 2021 is that that is going to be much, much harder than they hoped. That there are currents of real intense dissension and distrust within their own party because progressives in the House, they're not that interested in seeing a modest bipartisan infrastructure bill pass if they're not going to get their side of the agenda done as well. like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, they're not that interested in hammering out this compromise on infrastructure if there's any kind of built-in assumption that that means that they're going to be for all this other stuff when the time comes.

They have widely disparate governing ambitions, and it ultimately becomes impossible at the end of June, when on the same day, we have a deal. Biden goes out and announces that he has reached a deal on infrastructure with a group of centrist Democrats and mainstream Republicans. This reminds me of the days we used to get an awful lot done up in the United States Congress. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, goes out and says, We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill. That thing is never going to get a vote unless we get Build Back Better done as well. And with that, a linkage is created that becomes incredibly challenging for Democrats to

navigate. And what I remember about this moment is that in the absence of anybody else, like the president, saying with certainty what the party stands for, Pelosi says, I'm telling you what it stands for, and it's for a big progressive vision because I'm now linking a moderate infrastructure bill with a very progressive program of social change. And Michael, Biden himself responds to Pelosi going out and saying that by initially echoing her and saying, yeah, fair enough. I'm not going to sign infrastructure unless I get billed back better as well. For Biden to say that is shocking to the people who have been negotiating the infrastructure bill with him. People like Manchin and Sinema, Republicans like Susan Collins and Rob Portman

and Mitt Romney, they have not been laboring over here on the infrastructure bill with an eye towards passing that as a component of a massive liberal agenda. So why did Biden do it? Because he's driving all over the road, Michael. This is the common theme in everything that we're talking about. He's trying to tell the left what it needs to hear, and he's trying to tell centrists what they need to hear. So he goes and blurts out, I won't sign it unless I also get billed back better. He and his advisors get bombarded by folks on the Hill saying, what on earth was that? Biden calls Republican senators and promises that he's going to walk back his comments.

And he does walk back his comments. But what you end up with, Michael, is this kind of, you know, be generous to call it strategic ambiguity. It's just sort of like non-strategic ambiguity. And where we find ourselves at the beginning of July is not really clear. Like, are these things linked or not? Right. And as it happens, the decision, even if it was temporary, to embrace that linkage sets in motion a series of events that leads to one of these bills not passing, which is Build Back Better, and the other infrastructure just barely making it through. Just barely making it through and turning into an enormous political missed opportunity for Biden

and his party. Because what happens instead is they strike an infrastructure deal in June and then spend the entire summer in this excruciating game of chicken with progressive Democrats and Build Back Better on the one side, centrist Democrats and the infrastructure legislation on the other. And Biden himself is not stepping in to tell anybody, I think you're dead wrong about this and you have to knock it off and do things my way. And he also can give people the distinct impression, whether he's talking to Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, or members of the solid left in the House and Senate, that at the end of the day, he's basically sympathetic to the way they're

approaching things. And it becomes very, very easy for everybody involved in the standoff to think that they are truly on the same side as the president. Summer turns to fall. Biden goes to the Hill multiple times in late September and October. Time after time, Nancy Pelosi thinks that he's going to step in and sort of break this log jam. And time after time, he just refuses to do it. And all the while, his approval ratings are falling and falling and falling. And in fact, they fall to the point that Democrats just get clobbered in the off-year election in Virginia. And that is finally what presents the spur that the administration needs to say, you know what, we're going to pass infrastructure now. And by the time that happens, what could have been a set of meaningful victories becomes this kind of sour consolation prize that nobody in the party feels particularly good about. Alex, what you just

described, lawmakers feeling like the president is sympathetic to them, whether they are Republican senators or progressives in the House, you know, could be described as someone who's just very empathetic, or it could be described as someone speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Either way, what you're describing seems to be a president who doesn't seem all that prepared to tell people what they don't want to hear, and to have to make really tough choices within the democratic agenda. So how do you start to understand that? Well, I think that's a spot-on description of the political character we're dealing with in Joe Biden. I think that what you see over the course of 21 is the personal characteristics and leadership traits that made it so possible for him to build and maintain this broad anti-Trump coalition in 2020,

start to cut in the other direction when actually you do need to disappoint some people. You talk to people who know him really well, and some of them ascribe that to the long time that he spent in the Senate, which is an institution that's about personal relationships and building trust and getting along and a compromise, or at least that's what it was like, according to Joe Biden, when he was there. And the other part of it, Michael, is his own persistent indecision about what kind of president he wants to be. That if you're really, really invested in being FDR and enacting change on the scale of FDR, then clearly you need to have a set of tools and a set of incentives for getting somebody like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema on

board with that agenda that Biden has never demonstrated that he has. And if you want to be the more sort of middle-of-the-road uniter centrist Joe Biden, then you need to be prepared to tell the left that many of the things that they want to get done are not actually going to get done because they're not realistic. Right. So by the time his poll numbers are starting to decline, it would seem pretty clear that not making these crucial decisions, not having these hard conversations is becoming very consequential to his presidency. And the other thing that's becoming clear, right, Alex, is that his successes, which are meaningful, you know, the COVID relief bill and the infrastructure bill, those are not breaking through to people. They're certainly not breaking through in a way that

defines Biden's image as the president. But what you have is a president who has recorded some significant victories and then kind of vanished into the legislative process. But in the summer of 21, when he has passed a $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill, when they have distributed tens of millions of vaccines vaccines when people are starting to go back to work. It's not that happy days are here again, but there are significant signs of progress for the country under Biden's stewardship. And I would challenge you or anybody listening to this to think of one time that they can

remember seeing Joe Biden wearing a fireman's hat and standing in a station that was only saved from closure because of the money in the American Rescue Plan, or standing in a school that was only in session because of a vaccination program that he supervised, or standing at a groundbreaking for a road or a bridge or an electric vehicle charging station that was funded by the infrastructure law. It's not that he's done none of it, but he's not done it with the consistency or the intensity that would be necessary in order for the American people to think of Joe Biden and think of those accomplishments. So that's how you start to get to an approval rating below 40%.

It's how you start to get into a situation where rather than being seen as this unifying figure who beat Trump and healed the country, or as this bold liberal transformer, you instead start to get seen as this sort of passive, conventional, risk-averse figure who isn't keeping up with the mood of the country and emerging challenges that you didn't anticipate, like inflation. We'll be right back. So Alex, given everything you've just walked us through, how are the Democrats approaching the midterm elections? What is their message, given this very muddled legacy of the first 18 months of the Biden presidency?

competitive elections of 2022. You have seen a real move to lean hard into the concrete accomplishments that Democrats have put together. We need to upgrade our infrastructure. It's good for our future. It's good for our quality of life, good for families. When you look at a senator like Mark Kelly in Arizona or Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire. During negotiations for this law, I pushed for robust investments in our country's ports, dams, and waterways, including right here in Portsmouth. You do see them campaigning on the infrastructure law and the concrete projects that are underway in their state. And those same people are, you know, not in sort of gratuitous and hostile ways, but in pretty calculated and careful ways, drawing lines of disagreement with the president. When Biden announces, for instance, that his administration is going to rescind Title 42,

the Trump-era border control policy that cites the coronavirus pandemic to put in place a different set of controls and processes on certain kinds of migrants, you see an immediate and fierce reaction from Democrats like Mark Kelly. You know, my priority has been to make sure that we have a secure and orderly and humane process at the southern border. And I'm really concerned that the Biden administration right now, they do not have a plan in place to deal with this. Other vulnerable Democrats and particularly Democratic candidates in border states have to come out and say the administration's dead wrong. So I want to make sure that Arizona, that we do not pay a price for the failure in Washington,

D.C. So I'm going to keep holding the administration accountable for this. It's an indicator of how little Democrats feel like they need to defer to the president when a decision he's making is going to be politically uncomfortable for them. Right. And the reality is, this is a phenomenon that you see more of when a president is unpopular. And of course, you see much less of when a president is unpopular. And of course, you see much less of when a president is extremely popular. So these are the consequences of a president having a 39% or so approval rating. That's right. Another consequence is that you see Democrats going their own way on policy, even in ways that aren't exactly rebukes to the Biden administration.

Gas prices. We know the story. It's become a very sort of broadly held idea among vulnerable Democrats. Now there ought to be a federal gas tax holiday. I'm taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday, and I'm pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves. That's how we lower costs and get through these times. I'm Maggie Hasson, and I approve this message. That's the kind of bite-size, let's give the voters something to work with idea that you see candidates start putting out there in situations of real political duress. Interesting. So how does the White House feel about lawmakers striking out on their own with

legislation that's not coordinated with the White House, and in the case of the border policy, outright criticizing the leader of their own party. I think Biden historically has been pretty realistic about what makes other politicians tick. He has this line that he's used for years where he tells Democrats that he supports, I'll do anything I can to help you. I'll endorse you. I'll campaign against you, whatever you prefer. And so I think that he personally, he understands where these folks are coming from. I think where there is quite a bit of frustration in the White House and in the brain of the president is with his persistent unpopularity, despite what he sees as some pretty important accomplishments.

So Alex, what I'm not hearing you describe is an overarching democratic message heading into these midterms. So if you had to put your finger on what that message is or will be, how would you describe it? I would put it in sort of two pieces, Michael. I think one piece is trying to make the case to voters that, look, we know you're not thrilled with the state of the country right now, but we've made real progress, right? Are happy days here again? No. But are you better off today in June of 2022 than you were two years ago? Like, yeah, if you look at where the economy is, if you look at the coronavirus pandemic and so much else, just trying to make the case to voters that things aren't great, but we're improving. The other side of it is the

register that Democrats are actually much more comfortable campaigning in. So if part one is things are on the mend, part two is the Republicans are crazy. And the alternative to letting us keep on trying to repair the country in the way that we are is going back to Donald Trump and the maniacs who run his party. That's the Democratic argument. Alex, I'm curious if that message from the Democrats that we aren't Trump and we aren't Trump's allies, which could be construed as a kind of default mode of campaigning, is that actually quite powerful in this moment because of what Trump and his allies have come to represent, especially in this very moment where the January 6th committee is having these primetime hearings showing that Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn a presidential election, inspired a deadly insurrection at the Capitol, so on and so forth.

You know, Michael, I don't think that it's a cure-all for what ails the Democratic Party, because as disturbing as the revelations of the January 6th committee have been, for your average voter, I don't know that any of that displaces your feelings about inflation or gas prices or the rest as a primary voting issue. But as you and I are talking, there's a widespread expectation that the Supreme Court will either totally strike down or severely curtail abortion rights under Roe v. Wade. severely curtail abortion rights under Roe v. Wade. And every issue like that, that has the potential to remind voters of just how right-wing the Republican Party is on so many important issues that are actually close to home, that are not relatively abstract considerations like the

events of January 6th. Yeah, I think that does have the potential to swing some important races. Having said all of that, Democrats have still not resolved what their positive message is going to be in this election. And it's really, really hard to win or survive a midterm election as the incumbent party of an unpopular president if you don't have something really persuasive to say to voters about why they should stay the course. I wonder, Alex, if after all the reporting you did for this book, if you dabbled in counterfactuals at all and contemplated the question of whether Biden and the Democrats would be in a different place if they had taken office and spoken with much greater clarity about which party they were going to be.

Big transformational change or unifying incrementalism. It's very tempting to imagine doing that. Maybe it's not fair. doing that, maybe it's not fair. But is this a story of a presidency that is at the place where it is because the tough choice was just put off for too long? I do think it's a useful way to think about the failures of Biden's first year as president. Was there another path that he could have taken? Today, Democrats are still trying to revive elements of the Build Back Better agenda. And what you hear from a cross-section of Democrats, because they're now in this mood not of political confidence, but of political desperation, that if all they can agree on

is a bill that spends a bunch of money on renewable energy to fight climate change and re-regulates the prescription drug market in some important ways, that they would consider that a major, major victory and that it would help them significantly in the midterm elections. You hear that from folks on the left. You hear that from folks in the center. hear that from folks in the center. If they had been willing to make some hard choices earlier, the way they seem to be willing to make those choices now, and if Joe Biden had been willing to be considerably more decisive about what kind of president he really wanted to be and which items on his massive agenda he really wanted to spend his political capital on, would they be in a position now where they really knew what their positive

message was for 2022? Would they be in a position where they had an incumbent president with an approval rating higher than 40 percent? We can't say for sure, but I think it's hard to argue that they would not be better off in that version of events than they are today. Well, Alex, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In its fourth televised hearing,

the Congressional Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed evidence that former President Trump was directly involved in a scheme to pressure state officials to forward a slate of false pro-Trump electors in states won by President Biden. One of those state officials was the Republican Speaker of Arizona's House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers, who recalled receiving a phone call from Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who made a request. He said, well, we have heard by an official high up in the Republican legislature

that there is a legal theory or a legal ability in Arizona that you can remove the electors of President Biden and replace them. the electors of President Biden and replace them. And we would like to have the legitimate opportunity to come to that end and remove that. Bauer said he refused. And I said, look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it.

And I also swore to the Constitution to uphold it, and I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona, I will not do that. Several local election workers, including Shea Moss of Georgia, testified that the scheme and the false claims made by Trump and Giuliani to advance it had ruined their careers, unleashing waves of harassment and threats. How has this experience of being targeted by the former president and his allies affected your life? It's turned my life upside down. Don't want anyone knowing my name. I just don't do nothing anymore. I don't want to go anywhere. I second guess everything that I do. It's affecting my life in a major way. In every way. All because of lies.

Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Muj Zaydi, Nina Feldman, Jessica Chung, and Rob Zipko. It was edited by Patricia Willans, Lisa Chow, and Paige Cowan. Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landferk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.