Joe Biden's Brittle Grip
Joe Biden's Brittle Grip
The president's doing better than leaders of countries with worse economies, but much worse than U.S. governors
Let’s stick with Friday’s theme of the disjuncture between economic performance and economic sentiment here in the U.S.
More data and news in the past three days supports the idea that there’s a potentially fateful mismatch here, and that Democrats know there’s a mismatch, but are looking in questionable places to restore alignment. They seem to think the remedy is more effective recitation of Biden’s scorecard—noting that he passed an infrastructure bill and lowered prescription-drug prices more often. But what they really need is for people to believe the country as a whole is as prosperous as their communities.
Take this interview Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) did with Politico on Saturday. Walz tried to explain the popularity gap between Biden and Democratic governors in swing states, who outpoll him by wide margins, and offer Biden guidance on how to narrow the gap.
“Joe Biden, especially, is a fairly humble guy,” Walz said. “I think there was a slowness to talk about the things they did. It’s one of our jobs to get out there and talk about it…. Look, this is a golden age of infrastructure because of the president. Governors are the ones that are managing that—broadband expansion, removal of lead pipes. Put the signs up. Say where it came from.”
Walz is an interesting source for this kind of advice, because he’s a reasonably good proxy, at the state level, for Biden himself. He governs a state that’s bluer than the country as a whole, but only slightly, and he managed, with a narrow governing trifecta, to pass a bunch of popular progressive policy in 2023. The particulars are different for a bunch of obvious reasons, but the broad similarities to Biden’s first two years are pretty hard to miss: Biden also got a ton of popular policy enacted (in 2021 and 2022) with zero votes to spare.
The difference: Walz himself is very popular (54 percent approval against a 42 percent disapproval) where Biden’s numbers are almost the reverse.
Walz seems to think it’s because he’s getting credit for the infrastructure and economic booms that Biden actually delivered, and that people misallocate credit for good things happening in America because Biden’s too humble to make people aware of his policy successes. But…
Biden’s been touring the country touting his legislative accomplishments for many weeks. He routinely visits groundbreaking sites, mocks local Republicans for opposing his infrastructure bill then trying to claim credit for its projects. He’s taken to emailing hundreds of thousands of young people whose student loans his administration has forgiven, claiming direct credit for the money in their pockets in a way that’s much more Donald Trump than Barack Obama. And yet, people don’t approve of him; they like Tim Walz instead.
They actually like governors in general, including swing-state Democratic governors, basically all of whom have the kind of approval/disapproval splits Biden would need to be comfortably positioned for re-election.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting, though: