Sobering polls should cool Biden’s bullishness
Joe Biden could be forgiven for ignoring the polls lately. Not because they would have made for especially difficult reading for the president — his approval rating has improved in recent months — but because, with the wind in his sails after the midterms, he and his team won’t have had much reason to worry.
But a brace of surveys published today a reminder of the precariousness of the position which the president finds himself in. The first comes from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It finds that just 37 percent of Democrats say they want Joe Biden to run again in 2024. That is, to put it politely, not a great number for a president supposedly riding high after his better-than-expected midterms showing. In fact, it’s nothing short of terrible: almost two-thirds of supporters of the president’s own party don’t want him to run stick around.
The number looks even worse for Biden when you compare it to the results when the same question was asked just before the midterms. Then, the figure was 52 percent. For all that, Biden’s stock has risen since just before the midterms, when things were looking bleak for his party, Democratic voters are considerably less into the idea of Biden 2024 than they were at arguably the lowest ebb of his presidency so far.
The second unflattering poll comes courtesy of the Washington Post and ABC. Their survey finds that a majority of Americans are skeptical of Biden’s achievements in office, with 62 percent of American adults saying Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his time in office. The survey found that four in ten Americans say they are not as well-off financially since Biden became president. That, the Post reports, is the highest proportion to deliver that gloomy verdict since the survey began in 1986.
These are sobering numbers for a White House preparing for tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Biden had a skip in his step until last month’s classified docs face-plant. But his team appears aware that selling economic gains and infrastructure spending remain a big challenge.
And when it comes to the State of the Union, all signs point to the president returning to a familiar, and successful, message. Biden, who was working on his speech at Camp David this weekend, reportedly plans to emphasize unity during Tuesday evening’s address. The New York Times’s Peter Baker reports that the president “plans to present himself to what is likely to be his largest television audience of the year as the adult in the room, willing and able to reach bipartisan compromises in an age of deep partisanship, according to advisers.”
That would be a welcome change from the aggressive partisanship pursued by the White House last year. And when it comes to next year, Biden’s greatest strength remains the weakness of all the alternatives — especially his vice president.
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The big balloon bust-up
On Saturday, the Biden administration finally took Cockburn’s advice and shot the Chinese spy balloon out of the sky. Plenty of questions remain unanswered: why was the balloon allowed to float over the United States for so long? When was it first spotted? What was it sent to spy on? Why did China choose to send it now, just before a scheduled summit between Antony Blinken and Xi Jinping?
The debris had barely hit the water off the coast of the Carolinas before the White House’s victory lap triggered a row in Washington. On Sunday, senior defense officials said that balloons similar to the one shot down a day earlier had been sent into US airspace at least three times while Trump was in the White House. The claim prompted swift denials from a long list of senior Trump administration officials, and plenty of head-scratching. Only later did administration sources clarify that these incursions happened without anyone knowing at the time, and they only came to light more recently.
If the implication of the initial tidbit about Trump-era flights was to draw a comparison flattering to the current administration, a fuller picture isn’t damning of any particular president, but of American defense more generally, with Chinese spy balloons either going entirely undetected or tolerated above the United States for days.
First responders
Sarah Huckabee Sanders will deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union. The slot is often used to introduce a rising star to a national audience. Sanders is the youngest governor in the country, but, given her time as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, the Arkansas governor will be a more familiar face than some previous responders.
In recent years, progressives have muscled in on the SOTU-response game. Tomorrow night it will be first-term Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez’s turn, speaking under the aegis of the Working Families Party.
Haley’s Hail Mary
When Nikki Haley announces her run for the White House next week, she will be the first formal entrant into the 2024 race not named Donald Trump. For some, Haley’s bid embodies the 2016-all-over-again fears of some anti-Trump Republicans, who worry that a crowded field would hand the nomination to the former president.
Haley has an uphill battle, and no amount of enthusiastic claims from her allies that she relishes being the underdog will change the fact that she is less well-known and viewed less favorably than most of the other Republicans aiming at a 2024 run.
What you should be reading today
Rebeccah Heinrichs: The balloon is a Chinese middle finger to the US
Dave Seminara: Kamala Harris’s top ten word salads
Owen Matthews: How and when will the Ukraine war end?
Ramesh Ponnuru, Washington Post: A social security crisis is a terrible thing to welcome
Alex Isenstadt, Politico: The megadonor couple battling in the GOP’s civil war
Associated Press: If ChatGPT wrote the State of the Union
Poll watch
Approve: 44.0 percent
Disapprove: 52.3 percent
Net approval: -8.3 (RCP average)
Is the country heading in the right direction?
Right direction: 24 percent
Wrong direction: 73 percent (Monmouth)
