The president is going into the general election campaign with the lowest average approval rating on record:
President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden.
It doesn’t augur well for the incumbent to have approval ratings consistently below 40%. The record shows that incumbents with approval ratings in the 30s lose their reelection bids. When the president is seeking reelection, the main question before voters is whether he has earned another term in office. Biden hasn’t sold the voting public on the idea that he has. There may no longer be time to make the sale.
Biden’s position is somewhat reminiscent of the one that George H.W. Bush was in three decades ago. Like Biden, Bush’s average approval rating in the first part of the election year wasn’t very good (41.8%). Like Biden, Bush was preoccupied with foreign policy issues and was perceived to be neglecting domestic concerns. One big difference is that Bush was widely perceived as being a successful foreign policy president at the time, and he received high marks from the public for it. Bush was also facing a backlash from within his own party from conservatives dissatisfied with how he had governed.
Biden is arguably in worse shape politically than Bush was for a few reasons. However much voters disliked the elder Bush, they didn’t think he was incapable of doing the job. According to a recent Pew survey, 65% of registered voters have little or no confidence that Biden is physically fit enough to be president. Biden is presiding over a disastrous and increasingly unpopular policy of supporting the war in Gaza, and the backlash against the war is spreading across the country.
Thanks to his unconditional backing for the war and his contemptuous reaction to his own voters, Biden has been wrecking his own electoral coalition for months. He has been bleeding support in key states. Instead of working to fix this, he seems determined to alienate a large bloc of the voters that supported him last time. Meanwhile he keeps expecting that Trump will drive voters into his column just by being on the ballot. Biden and his campaign radiate smugness and complacency, and they are going to pay a political price for it.
There are all the usual caveats. The general election is still six months away. Something could happen in the meantime to boost Biden’s numbers or cause Trump’s support to collapse. Incumbent presidents have been re-elected more often than they have been voted out over the last seventy years. This election is highly unusual because it puts a former president against an incumbent, and that hasn’t happened since 1892. The election will likely be a close one with the margins in a few states deciding the outcome. Having said all that, Biden appears to be in the weakest position of any incumbent president seeking re-election in generations.
It is possible that enough voters will be so appalled by the idea of Trump returning to power that they will overlook all of this, but I wouldn’t bet anything on a Biden victory right now. Especially after the last seven months of enabling war crimes and mass starvation in Gaza, Biden won’t be able to recover the support that he has lost because he remains stubbornly committed to his indefensible policy.