According to the most recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, President Biden has his lowest support rating since taking office, and Democrats are primarily to blame.
Currently, 36% of respondents in the poll approve of Biden. In the data, a 9-point loss inside his own party is to blame for the 4 percentage-point decline from June.
Even while 75% of Democrats support Biden’s efforts, that number is deemed low for a president’s own party. According to a survey conducted last month, 84 percent of Democrats said they agreed with Biden’s job performance.
Republicans and independents support Biden’s leadership significantly less; only 5% of Republicans and 28% of independents do so. They are the same as they were a month ago.
For context, Donald Trump’s approval within his party when he was president was never that low in the poll, not even after the Jan. 6 insurrection (77%) or the Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist demonstration (76%), at which one person was killed — and whose participants Trump dismissed as “very fine people, on both sides.”
In this survey, four times as many respondents said they strongly disapprove of the job Biden is doing than approve — 43% to 11%. And only 30% of Democrats said they strongly approve of the job the president is doing.
Biden has continually faced a lack of enthusiasm among his base. He was never progressives’ preferred choice for president, but many held their nose to vote for him against Trump.
That was certainly true for younger voters. In 2020, voters 45 and younger went for Biden by a 56%-42% margin, according to exit polls. But in this survey, 63% say they disapprove of the job Biden is doing. Just 30% approve, compared with 40% of those 45 and older.
Younger voters are also among the least enthusiastic about Biden — just 5% say they strongly approve of the job he’s doing, on par with whites without college degrees and white evangelical Christians, reliably Republican voters.
In his run for the White House, Biden promised progressives the political equivalent of the moon, but he has run into the realities of governing.
Many progressives, angry at the conservative lurch in the country due to recent Supreme Court decisions on guns and abortion, say they think Biden simply hasn’t acted boldly enough to fight for their initiatives.
Biden’s cratered approval numbers are a bad sign for Democrats in this midterm election year. The party in power traditionally faces headwinds in a president’s first midterm, and when its president’s approval rating is this low, that can spell even more trouble.
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