Missed vaccination deadline and botched Afghanistan withdrawal ranked top two by FiveThirtyEight.
QUICK FACTS:
- By Biden’s six-month anniversary in office Democrats started to feel a lot less certain that Biden could deliver on his big plans and promises to return to normalcy, according to FiveThirtyEight.
- And now, after a year into his White House tenure, Biden is facing sliding approval ratings among his own supporters, who doubt that he can restore the country to where it was before COVID-19.
- FiveThirtyEight cites the summer of 2021 as the turning point for Democrats, during which Biden’s approval rating dipped among independents, sinking 12 percentage points between July and September, according to the Pew Research Center.
- Per a June survey, 53% of Democrats characterized Biden as a “very strong” leader, that number dropping significantly by early August, when a new YouGov survey showed that only 44% of Democrats viewed him in the same light.
- By mid-September, that number dropped even further, to 37%, FiveThirtyEight notes.
- Read the five reasons below.
FIVETHIRTYEIGHT’S FIVE REASONS DEMS ARE LESS CONFIDENT IN JOE:
- FiveThirtyEight lists the first reason Democrats are going sour on Biden: He missed his self-imposed July 4 deadline to have 70% of Americans vaccinated, and the delta variant of the coronavirus hospitalized and killed thousands of more Americans.
- His promised withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic and much-criticized.
- Inflation and supply-chain issues worsened, despite officials’ claims that these issues would be temporary.
- One of Democrats’ big election-reform bills failed in Congress.
- And talks of Democrats’ sweeping social spending plan stalled, becoming less certain after West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema rejected its price tag.
BACKGROUND:
- It wasn’t just that Democratic voters started to lose confidence in Biden’s strength as a leader, however, FiveThirtyEight noted.
- During the summer months, YouGov also found that Democrats became less and less likely to believe that he could successfully bring the country together.
- “If we recall how things were a year ago at this time, the vaccines were just being rolled out and there was a tremendous amount of optimism that the end of the pandemic was near,” said David Hopkins, a Boston College political scientist. “That’s the way that the media and Biden portrayed the situation.”
