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      ‘It’s a tough time’: why is Biden one of the most unpopular US presidents?

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      ‘It’s a tough time’: why is Biden one of the most unpopular US presidents? Puzzle of Biden’s unpopularity has some pieces within his control and some not, experts say, as Covid casts a shadow over his first year in officeJoe Biden ends his first year in office at a particularly bleak moment for a US president who promised competency and normalcy.Much of his domestic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill, impeded by members of his own party. The virus is once again raging out of control: daily infections of Covid-19 have soared to record levels, hospitalizing more Americans than at any previous point during the pandemic. The administration’s vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers was blocked by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. Inflation is at a nearly 40-year high. Diplomatic talks have so far failed to pull Russia back from the brink of war with Ukraine.Attack, attack, attack: Republicans drive to make Biden the bogeymanRead moreAfter winning more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, Biden is now – just 12 months later – one of the country’s most unpopular presidents.For months, Biden’s approval ratings have languished in the mid to low 40s, with an average approval rating of 42%. ​​A Quinnipiac poll released last week found him at a dire 33%, which the White House has dismissed as an outlier. Nevertheless, among his modern predecessors, only Donald Trump fared worse at this point in their presidencies.The puzzle of Biden’s unpopularity has many pieces, pollsters and political analysts say.Biden came to office with lofty ambitions: he promised to lift the threat of deadly virus and usher in a new era of responsive governance and bipartisanship in Washington. One year into his presidency, Biden remains confronted by an unabating pandemic, a nation still very much divided and a Republican party that continues to embrace the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.“Whenever a president disappoints expectations, that’s a problem,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution who also served as a White House policy adviser to former President Clinton.Galston said the administration has “not done a good job of managing expectations” around Covid. In July, Biden came just shy of declaring “independence” from the virus, only to be proven wrong by the arrival of the fast-spreading Delta variant.Now, amid a surge caused by the Omicron variant, the president and his team are recalibrating. Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, recently said that Omicron would “find just about everybody”. Biden recently conceded that eradicating the virus was unlikely, but that it was possible to “control” it.It is the case for swing voters who believed Biden would govern as a centrist bridge-builder in an age of deep division, Galston continued, and for Democrats to whom Biden promised an ambitious legislative agenda despite holding wafer-thin margins in Congress.Sarah Longwell, a prominent anti-Trump Republican strategist, has observed support for the president decline among voters in the focus groups she has convened over the past year. When asked to grade Biden’s first year, many voters she spoke to, including Democrats, gave him Cs, Ds and Fs.The grades, Longwell said, not only reflected their views of the president, but also a shared discontent as the pandemic enters its third year and inflation continues to rise.“There’s an element of it that has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” Longwell said. “It’s just a tough time.”Line chart of President Biden’s job approval rating in 2021 by political party. All US parties approval of Biden declined.Asked about Biden’s gloomy reviews, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, offered a similar explanation.“People are fatigued across the country. It’s impacting how they live, how they work. There are worries about their kids, their ability to experience joyful things in life like concerts and going to restaurants and seeing friends,” Psaki said. “We understand that.”“The president knows that the best, most important step he can take is to continue to fight to get the pandemic under control and also to lower costs for Americans across the country,” she added.Biden’s popularity began to slip as the Delta variant of Covid-19 spread across the country, falling sharply after the US’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 service members were killed by a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.Though a majority of Americans favored withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the desperate scenes from Kabul as the Taliban took control undercut perceptions of Biden as a seasoned foreign policy expert who would restore America’s standing on the world stage.“The way in which we left Afghanistan inflicted a blow on the president’s general image of experience and competence, which had a lingering effect,” Galston said.Historically, voters tend to punish the president’s party in the first midterm elections after a new administration takes power. But the defeats tend to be steeper when a president is unpopular. According to Gallup polling, presidents with job approval ratings below 50% have seen their parties lose an average of 37 House seats during the midterm elections.Already Republicans’ unexpected strength last year in off-cycle elections in states Biden won by wide margins in 2020 – like Virginia and New Jersey – has delivered a stark warning of a dangerous future to Democrats.The results suggested that the resistance-driven passion that drove Democratic victories during the Trump era had fizzled. Perhaps most alarming for Democrats was the electorate’s deep sense of malaise. Despite a mass vaccination campaign and trillions of dollars in relief money, voters feel worse now about the state of the pandemic and the economy than they did earlier in Biden’s presidency, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey.Few voters give Biden credit for muscling through a trillion-dollar investment in the nation’s infrastructure or passing the American Rescue Plan, which sent checks to most Americans and slashed poverty rates.“It’s an ironic situation where the policies are more popular than the politicians, which is very rare,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Usually it’s the other way around.”Further capturing that frustration, a Gallup poll released on Monday found a dramatic shift in party preference over the last year, swinging from a nine-point Democratic advantage at the beginning of 2021 to a five-point Republican advantage by the end of the year. The change follows the collapse of Biden’s presidential approval ratings.Line chart of a Gallup poll surveying US political party affiliation in 2021. Democrats advantage to begin 2021 flipped to a Republican lead by the end.This augurs poorly for Democrats, leaving a narrowing window to deliver on their campaign promises, from Build Back Better to voting rights and immigration reform.Messy intra-party negotiations over Biden’s sprawling climate and social policy bill overshadowed the policy, leaving the public with a shallow understanding of its contents and concern over its cost. The legislation remains in limbo after Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, announced he could not support the measure in its current form.Amid the stalemate over his agenda, Democrats have become disenchanted with Biden.He is bleeding support among young voters angry over inaction on climate change, health care and student debt forgiveness. Hispanic voters have lost confidence in Biden’s handling of the pandemic and the economy, a red flag for Democrats after they shifted toward Trump and the Republican party in 2020. And support has been sliding among Black voters, who were critical to Biden’s victory but have been disappointed by the lack of progress on voting rights and police reform.In an attempt to reset, Biden recently delivered a pair of searing speeches, during which he implored the Senate to pass federal voting rights legislation and accused Republicans who stand in the way of standing on the side of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis.Though not all the variables are within Biden’s control, Lake said there is still plenty of time– and opportunities – to improve his standing before the midterms in November. She said the president’s newly emboldened tone was a good start, that would help to “energize” Democrats, while signalling “strength” to wary independents.“He’s in leadership mode now,” she said.Democrats widely applauded Biden’s rhetorical shift, but some civil rights leaders and voting rights advocates boycotted the speech in Atlanta to express disapproval of what they view as a belated push on an issue that is paramount for their communities and the functioning of democracy itself. In a statement, the president of the NAACP Derrick Johnson, said it was past time for the administration to “match their words with actions”.Lorella Praeli, co-president of the progressive group, Community Change Action, said voters need to see Biden fighting on their behalf.She urged the president to use every executive tool at his disposal to ease the financial pressures facing millions of Americans, like canceling student debt, as he continues to push for a path forward on Build Back Better, voting rights and immigration reform.Part of the challenge for Biden, she said, is to convince a demoralized public that “the future is still up for grabs”.“Fight for people, deliver for people and then make sure they know what has happened,” she said. “It’s really that simple.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The Guardian view of Joe Biden: he needs to face opponents within – and without

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      The Guardian view of Joe Biden: he needs to face opponents within – and withoutEditorialIf the president can’t build better he won’t be back. Instead Donald Trump might return The US president, Joe Biden, suffered his worst day in office – so far – last Thursday. Mr Biden had begun that morning hoping to convince his party to support his push to change Senate rules to pass two voting rights bills. Even before he got a chance to make his case, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a rightwing Democrat, rejected the president’s plan. At a stroke, two key parts of Mr Biden’s agenda – racial justice and democracy – appear stalled. On the same day, the US supreme court struck down the Biden administration’s requirement for businesses to make employees either be vaccinated against Covid-19 or test weekly and wear a mask at work. The president’s pledge to lift the threat of the pandemic won’t be redeemed any time soon.Mr Biden’s opponents paint him as a leader of drift and dwindling energy. If this view settles, then it’ll be ​​an image hard to shift. There’s little room for reassessment in politics. That is why the president must change course and have a clear-eyed view of his opponents within and without. The “moderate” wing of the Democratic party has already gutted the president’s climate plans. These Democrats, like most Republicans, depend on a donor class which wants to ​​render legislation inert that would hit corporate profits.On the campaign trail Mr Biden said he would deal with the threat. In office he has not done so. The president faces a concerted campaign of leveraging money to protect money. Employers claimed that his “vaccine-or-test” mandate would cost billions of dollars to implement. A number of Republican-dominated states have fought its imposition. Covid-19 has killed almost a million Americans and hospitals are overwhelmed with unvaccinated patients. Conservative judges share an ideological aim with the Republican party to dismantle the system – at the cost of American lives during a pandemic – which permits the federal government to repeal unfair state laws.Mr Biden’s problem is that, on paper, the Democrats seem unassailable: controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency. But this is far from the case. Democrats were once something of a “party of state”. They controlled both the House and the Senate between 1933 and 1981, interrupted only by two brief Republican interludes. The Democrats won the presidency two-thirds of the time during this period. Today neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority. This helps to polarise politics as party differences cut against collaboration.Slim majorities now make radical change. Democrats demonstrated this with Obamacare. Republicans did the same with taxes in 2017. Bernie Sanders advises the Democrats to boil down their offer to its most popular elements and hold votes to extend child tax credits, cut drug prices and raise the federal hourly minimum wage to $15. This feels right and ought to appeal to Mr Biden: putting Democrats on the right side, and Republicans on the wrong side, of public opinion before November’s midterm elections. The stakes could not be higher. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times warned: “Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back”. That might open the door to Donald Trump – or someone worse.TopicsJoe BidenOpinionUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS supreme courtUS CongresseditorialsReuse this content More

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      Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attack | Robert Reich

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      Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attackRobert ReichKyrsten Sinema receives millions from business and opposes progressive priorities. Republicans who voted to overturn an election still bag big bucks. Whose side are CEOs on? Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.The US supreme court to Americans: tough luck if you get Covid at work | Robert ReichRead moreThat’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees (Pacs).But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.Over the last four decades, corporate Pac spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union Pacs contributed about as much as corporate Pacs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared with this 40-year record of corporate sedition.A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope | Robert ReichRead moreDespotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.My message to every CEO in America: you need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy – and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS political financingRepublicansDemocratsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatecommentReuse this content More

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      Is the United States heading for civil war? Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Barbara Walter, a former CIA adviser, about her new book about how civil wars start, and what politicians and the public should be doing to prevent another one in the US

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop them is available here Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Kyrsten Sinema blocks filibuster reform as Biden continues ‘fight’ for voting rights – video

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      US president Joe Biden said he was not sure if his administration could push voting rights legislation through Congress, but he would continue fighting to change the law. ‘I don’t know if we can get it done,’ he said to reporters. ‘But I know one thing, as long as I have a breath in me … I am going to be fighting to change the way these legislatures are moving.’ Earlier, Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema reaffirmed she would not support any change to the filibuster rules, effectively killing her party’s hope of passing the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation.

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      Sinema says no to filibuster reform and scuttles Democrats’ voting rights hopes

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      Sinema says no to filibuster reform and scuttles Democrats’ voting rights hopesArizona senator says she will not support filibuster changesSinema’s floor speech condemned by voting rights activists Kyrsten Sinema publicly and bluntly reaffirmed she would not support any change to the filibuster rules on Thursday, effectively killing her party’s hope of passing the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation.Sinema speaks out against filibuster reform after House sends voting rights bill to Senate – liveRead moreSinema took to the Senate floor around noon on Thursday and said she would not support any changes to the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.“While I continue to support these [voting rights] bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” said Sinema, a first-term Democrat from Arizona.“We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy, and it cannot be achieved by one party alone. It cannot be achieved solely by the federal government. The response requires something greater and, yes, more difficult than what the Senate is discussing today.”Sinema’s speech comes at an extremely perilous moment for US democracy. Republican lawmakers in 19 states have enacted 34 new laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, that impose new voting restrictions. They have also passed a slew of bills that seek to inject more partisan control into election administration and the counting of votes, an unprecedented trend experts are deeply concerned about and call election subversion. Many of those measures have been passed in state legislatures on simple majority, party-line votes.For months, Sinema and fellow Democrat Joe Manchin have staunchly defended the filibuster, which stands as the major hurdle to voting rights reform. No Republicans support either the voting rights bills or changing the rules of the filibuster, so Democrats cannot do anything unless both senators are on board.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has pledged a vote on the measure and rule changes by Monday, a public holiday to celebrate the civil rights leader Martin Luther King.The opposition is also a major blow to Joe Biden, who gave a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday calling on Democrats to support the bill. Sinema gave the speech about an hour before Biden traveled to the Capitol to meet Democrats to urge them to support rule changes.“I hope we can get this done but I’m not sure,” Biden said after his meeting with Democrats on Thursday.“Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we can come back and try it a second time. We missed this time. We missed this time,” he added.Manchin released his own statement on Thursday afternoon confirming he would not vote to change the filibuster.“For those who believe that bipartisanship is impossible, we have proven them wrong. Ending the filibuster would be the easy way out. I cannot support such a perilous course for this nation when elected leaders are sent to Washington to unite our country by putting politics and party aside,” he said.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the White House would continue to fight for voting rights legislation, but declined to offer any specifics. “We’re gonna keep fighting until the votes are had,” she said.Civil rights leaders quickly denounced Sinema after her speech on Thursday.“History will remember Senator Sinema unkindly. While she remains stubborn in her ‘optimism’, black and brown Americans are losing their right to vote,” said Martin Luther King III, the son of the civil rights leader. “She’s siding with the legacy of Bull Connor and George Wallace instead of the legacy of my father and all those who fought to make real our democracy.”“Arizonans value leaders who can compromise and work across the aisle, but let me be clear: the filibuster is non-negotiable. Indivisibles, like myself, worked tooth-and-nail to get Sinema elected in 2018 – we made calls, registered voters and knocked on doors in the 120F weather,” said Signa Oliver, an activist with the Arizona chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots group.“We know the weight of this trifecta, and we will not sit idly by as Sinema lets our hard work and the prospect of a better country for all wither so she can be branded a bipartisan leader.”Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman from California, tweeted: “Shame on you.”Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, praised Sinema’s speech as an act of “political courage” that could “save the Senate as an institution”, according to the Associated Press.For months, Democrats have championed two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former measure would overhaul federal election rules to set baseline requirements for voter access. It would require 15 days of early voting, as well as same-day and automatic registration. It also includes provisions that make it harder to remove election officials without justification, and would make it easier for voters to go to court to ensure their votes aren’t thrown out.The latter bill would require states where there is repeated evidence of recent voting discrimination to get changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect. It updates and restores a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that was struck down by the supreme court in 2013.The US House passed a mega-bill on Thursday morning that combined both of those measures into a single bill. It was a procedural move to allow the Senate to quickly hear and debate the measure.TopicsUS SenateThe fight to voteUS voting rightsDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressJoe BidennewsReuse this content More