At first glance, Joe Biden appears to be doing quite well. But there are signs of trouble underneath – areas where partisan overstretching threatens the foundations of what some have hailed as the modern order of things.
Joe Biden enjoys an average job approval rating of 54%, which is good for a president in midterms or up for reelection but below the 100-day average of every president since World War II except Donald Trump. Biden’s 42% disapproval is higher than theirs and roughly equal to Trump’s. That may not be true if, as The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter suggests, polls are showing Republican voters are too diminutive.
The deepening party divisions of the last quarter-century have not ended.
Biden’s appeal to white non-college voters apparently remains circumscribed. This marks the retirement of lower Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, the chairwoman of the House Democratic campaign committee for the (disappointing) 2020 cycle. In 2012, 58% of her district voted for Barack Obama, and last year it was 50% to 48% for Trump; she won by just 52% to 48%.
Likewise, Rep. Tim Ryan is leaving his Youngstown-Akron district to run for U.S. Senate in Ohio, and Conor Lamb of suburban Pittsburgh may do so in Pennsylvania. He was not helped by local Democratic environmental regulators, whose decisions resulted in the cancellation of a $1.5 billion investment by US Steel.
Biden’s Democrats have not fared well among upscale voters pushed aside by Trump. A May 1 special election in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area produced two Republican nominees in a district that Trump carried only 51% to 47% last year. Republican candidates won 62% of the vote, while Democrats took just 37%.
That may reflect liberal apathy. The audience for Joe Biden’s April 28 speech was about 30% smaller than Trump’s audience for his State of the Union in 2020. Viewership on pro-Biden MSNBC and CNN is down by even larger percentages. And the never-Trump electorate also appears to be fading.
Now that Trump is out of office and off Twitter, Trump haters no longer watch his latest outrage or discuss it with like-minded friends.
Meanwhile, posh voters don’t seem thrilled with the woke Biden agenda when they see it up close. Turnout was high across the metropolis as voters in wealthy Southlake, Texas, voted by 70% to 30% to oust school board members who mandated the teaching of critical race theory, something Biden’s Education Department wants to encourage.
Their reactions were apparently similar to those of parents of students at elite New York schools, as Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute reports. So much for “systemic racism.”
Even in hyperliberal Austin, 57 percent of voters reinstated a law banning camping in public areas. The desire to “keep Austin weird” apparently doesn’t go as far as supporting California-style tent cities under every overpass.
Biden’s connection to homelessness policy may be tenuous; that’s not the case with what’s happening on our southern border. Despite the administration’s insistence that there’s no problem, even Biden himself has called it a “crisis.”
His insistence in a televised April 29 speech that it was under control failed to impress Democrats in border constituencies. “What I didn’t hear tonight was a plan to address the immediate crisis at the border,” said Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
While Biden might “say we have everything under control,” said Henry Cuellar, a Texas lawmaker from Laredo, “we are not paying attention to the communities on the border. And we have no control over it. I can tell you that.” He’s right: 170,000 people were detained at the southern border in March, the highest monthly number since 2006.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the retirements of borderline Democrats Filemon Vela of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and Ann Kirkpatrick, who represents Tucson and Cochise County in Arizona.
There’s no doubt that most voters — outside of die-hard Democrats — reject a change in administration, as well as Kamala Harris’s pathetic claim that “lack of climate change adaptation and resilience” are the causes of the influx of migrants at the border. A CNN poll shows 78% agreeing that the border is in “crisis,” while an NBC poll shows 59% disapproval to 35% approval of Biden’s actions on border security and immigration.
The Biden-Harris claim that all is well at the border shows a failure to grasp the absurd, which in politics can have fatal consequences. It is also evident in the claim of “systemic racism” among the police, which reached absurd proportions when Democratic partisans criticized the police for shooting one black girl who was about to stab another.
With murders rising in city after city to historic highs and tens of thousands of people crossing the border illegally, lukewarm approval ratings and a feeble electorate may not be enough for Democrats to maintain their current, brittle majority.
