President Joe Biden’s weak political standing looks like cement around the feet of the Democratic majorities in Congress. And even though the 2022 midterm elections are still more than 9 months away, history tells us Biden’s job rating isn’t likely to improve and more likely will deteriorate before Election Day.
NBC News was the latest media entity to drop some bad news on the Democrats. According to its latest bipartisan poll, conducted Jan. 14-18, Biden’s job approval rating stood at 43 percent approve and 54 percent disapprove. A stunning 72 percent of respondents believed the country is on the wrong track, while 22 percent said it’s headed in the right direction.
That’s significant considering midterm elections are typically a performance review on the sitting president. And if voters don’t like the job he is doing or aren’t satisfied with the direction of the country, they can’t vote against the president because he’s not on the ballot. So voters often vent that frustration against the president’s party. Considering Republicans need a net gain of just one seat to gain control of the Senate and just five seats for a House majority, Democrats need a politically healthy Biden to survive the midterm elections.
It might be easy for Democrats to find solace in the amount of time left before Election Day. But history is a dose of reality for anyone thinking Biden’s standing is going to dramatically improve — or improve much at all.
Looking back more than 70 years, there hasn’t been a single president who substantially improved his job approval rating from late January/early February of a midterm election year to late October/early November, according to Gallup’s rich polling archive.
More specifically, in the...