Joe Biden has crossed another major milestone, and I’m not talking about him setting records for presidential vacations, ice-cream eating, or inflation.
According to polling aggregate site 538, which has a hard-left bent on its editorial side, Biden is now the most unpopular president in recorded history at this point in his tenure. Just in his second year, he is more unpopular than any of his predecessors where polling data exists, stretching back nearly 90 years.
No other president has managed to sink as low as Biden has by the 517-day mark. Even Donald Trump, who often sat in the low-40s in approval surveys, mostly due to personality disagreements, wasn’t this far down in the aggregate by his second June in office. Heck, things are so bad that you can’t even use the word “polarizing” to describe Biden anymore because he’s not actually that polarizing. Instead, he’s just widely disapproved of by a large majority of Americans.
None of this is surprising. On Monday, the president made it clear that the pain is the point, bleating while on vacation (again) that crushing inflation and gas prices are a chance to “make a fundamental turn” toward green energy. Biden is telegraphing to Americans that he wants them to hurt, and Americans have gotten the message. Further, as former Obama advisor Larry Summers said on Sunday, there is no historical precedent to taming this kind of inflation without a recession. In other words, things are actually going to get worse.
That leads me to the mid-terms. I’m still seeing projections of Republicans only gaining 15-20 seats, with even a few true believers suggesting the Democrats could hold the House. On what planet is that possible given that Biden is this unpopular heading into November’s elections? We are no longer talking about just a normal, first mid-term lull, which likely would have delivered the House to the GOP anyway. We are now talking about a guy who is disapproved of at a historic level, and he is only continuing to press the gas as the country careens toward an economic cliff.
There is no escape here. I know Democrats, especially in the press, like to make themselves feel better by suggesting some Deaux ex Machina could occur prior to voters going to the polls, but that’s essentially an impossibility. With Democrats in charge of all three branches and the fact that congressional races are hundreds of individual contests (i.e. you can’t just take out a single candidate), anything else that happens will simply be placed at the feet of Biden, not blamed on Republicans.
Lastly, the clock has run on economic improvement happening in time for the mid-terms. It’s not possible for inflation to be tamed to any reasonable level by November. It’s also not possible to avoid the stagnation the country is entering into. Biden made this bed with his radical, idiotic policy pursuits, and he’s about to be strapped to it like a gurney.