Propaganda works: Joe Biden’s unpopularity with the American public

Joe Biden is, in historical terms, a very unpopular president. A new ABC/Ipsos poll has his approval rating at 33%:

Overall, more than 70 percent of Republican adults would be satisfied with Trump as a nominee.

By comparison, 57 percent of Democrats would feel the same about President Biden being the Democratic Party’s choice.

According to the survey, Biden’s job approval rating has dropped to a low for any US president in the past 15 years.

At 33 percent, Biden’s approval rating is worse “than Trump’s low as president (36 percent) and the lowest since George W Bush from 2006-2008”, read the report. Fifty-eight percent disapprove of Biden’s work.

Some 31 percent of women approve of Biden’s work in office, a new low. Back in 2020, he won 57 percent of women. Among men, 34 percent approve of his work in office.

There was also no good news from Black and Hispanic voters: Biden’s approval rating is 21 points below average among Black people and 15 points below average among Hispanic people, compared with 6 points among white people.

Now this is one poll, but Biden hasn’t been close to 50% approval in any of the major polls since the first few months of his presidency. At this point his approval numbers have been identical or worse than Trump’s for the majority of both men’s first presidential terms, which is amazing when considering that Trump was both quite unpopular in historical terms, extremely polarizing, and objectively horrendous at his job, which he barely pretended to do.

Part of this of course is simply negative polarization, which is getting more intense all the time, but that explanation is basically tautological. Why does a pretty large majority of the public appear to think that Biden is a bad president, given that only about a quarter of Americans are self-identified Republicans, the economy is by all objective metrics in pretty good shape, the U.S. isn’t officially involved in any foreign wars at the moment for the first time in almost forever, and by far the biggest domestic crisis facing the nation is quite obviously Trump’s overt anti-democratic authoritarianism, at least in the eyes of anyone who hasn’t been brainwashed by Fox News et. al?

That last detail is the other than that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln caveat here. Biden is unpopular because contemporary propaganda machines work — and not only on right wingers. An indirect effect of the right wing scream machine is that Biden’s popularity is very soft among left/progressives, who would never vote for Trump, but who are affected by the constant negative drumbeat about Biden’s age and mental sharpness, the cost of carton of eggs, the “border crisis,” etc. etc., and, most perversely of all, by the constant right wing propaganda about how unpopular Biden is, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (An additional factor here is genuine disgust over the Gaza situation, but do any of these people think that any Republican, let alone Trump, would be better than Biden on that issue?).

I’m not a Biden fanboi, but even taking into account that roughly 30% of the voting public is genuinely reactionary/authoritarian — aka, the Trumpland base — Biden ought to be considered at least a pretty good president by the vast majority of the American public, especially in comparison to human flaming dumpster fire Donald Trump.

But the actual situation is radically different, for exactly the same reasons that said dumpster fire became president, and may well become president again. Incredibly — this is a rhetorical phrase, it actually isn’t incredible at all — Trump is at the moment consistently found to be at least as popular with the American public as Biden. The reaction among liberal-left people to this tends to be outright denial, since it’s so disturbing. Indeed, I’ve seen several comments on LGM recently to the effect that there’s nothing to worry about in re the presidential race, because obviously Biden is going to win easily, and the real focus of concern ought to be holding on to the Senate.

The basis for this seems to be some combination of hoping (reasonably) that the Dobbs backlash continues to drive turnout, wishcasting, and understandable incredulity that we are where we are. I share all these beliefs/biases, but anything within a light year of complacency isn’t warranted by the data available, even with all their undoubted limitations.