President Biden is doing fine right now….
Going ‘BIG” after Trump is helping him and so is Trump’s looking backwards….
We know that midterm elections are almost inevitably referenda on the incumbent president. One way to think about it is that in November of a president’s second (or sixth) year in office, voters go to the polls looking to vote for or against that president and, not finding the name, simply vote for or against every candidate wearing the same color jersey as that incumbent president. The deeper into a president’s term we get, the more meaningful his job-approval rating becomes, and the greater its predictive value.
As Gallup’s Frank Newport and Lydia Saad recently wrote in Public Opinion Quarterly, “The strong relationship between presidential approval and both presidential and midterm elections is fascinating and impressive given the simplicity of this question devised more than 70 years ago.”
The bottom line: Democratic hopes of retaining their slim majorities in Congress are almost entirely dependent upon President Biden not sinking them.
Biden’s approval ratings in the Gallup poll have ranged from a low of 50 percent (in their most recent survey earlier this month) to a high of 57 percent (in their first poll of his presidency, taken over his first two weeks in office). Gallup’s average over seven polls is 55 percent, with 41 percent disapproving.
Even a cursory look at presidential approval ratings in this period of ultra-partisanship underscores how monolithic each party is. Among Democrats, his approval has ranged from 90 to 98 percent; among Republicans, he’s been between 8 and 12 percent. There is little question how partisans on each side would vote; the only question is how many of them will show up….
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Midterm elections have a lot of moving parts. There is never just one thing to watch. But there’s no better baseline than Biden’s approvals…