Biden on Wednesday. (Mandel Ngan/Getty)
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On January 6 of this year, the Washington Post ran an op-ed from President Joe Biden, who wrote that “four years ago, our democracy was put to the test — and prevailed.” This feels like a declaration from another reality, one where Donald Trump was held accountable for his assault on democracy. Instead, he’s returning to power next week. Biden didn’t mention Trump by name in the Post piece. It was similar to his inauguration speech, when he alluded to the Capitol attack but didn’t personally identify its ringleader. Biden tried to ignore Trump after defeating him in 2020, which is normal behavior for a new president, but Trump was never a normal defeated president. Biden claimed he sought the presidency “to restore the soul of America,” but American voters seemingly traded that soul for the idea of cheaper eggs. | | Joe Biden's underrated presidency | | |
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We can quibble over the specific policy choices that might’ve led to this dire moment, but it’s worth examining why Americans soured so completely on the Biden administration. Here at Public Notice, we observed in late 2023 that Biden had “achieved a lot — with the notable exception of popularity.” But as Glinda reminds us in Wicked, popularity is “everything that really counts.” Political success is less about aptitude than the way you’re viewed. Unfortunately, Biden never sold voters on his admirable record, and given the grave threat Trump poses, he probably shouldn’t have gambled democracy on what in hindsight was clearly a long-shot reelection bid. But it’s worth remembering that his administration got off to a strong start. Biden entered the White House with the nation in almost as fractious a state as it was in 1861. (Secret Service preparations for his inauguration were the most extensive in modern history.) Yet he resolved to govern like it was 1999 by reaching across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation that would benefit all Americans. He wanted to put Trump firmly in the past, but the former president’s coup was ongoing. For example, many prominent Republicans initially refused to even call Biden “president” — using only his last name while reserving the title of honor for Trump. Republican leaders went as far as to outright refuse to admit Biden had legitimately won the election. (Watch GOP whip Steve Scalise dance around the issue below in a Sunday show hit from February 2021.) Biden took the high road and still sought to work with Republicans, even those who insinuated that he’d cheated his way into office. However, in retrospect, the GOP’s election denial was about more than just appeasing Trump’s wounded pride. It was a coordinated and successful effort to diminish Biden in the public eye. A Monmouth University poll from September 2022 showed that 61 percent of Republicans still believed the 2020 election was stolen. If a significant segment of voters believe your presidency is illegitimate, not even the best legislation will win them over. Barack Obama enjoyed an approval rating above 60 percent during the first seven months of his presidency. This honeymoon period was the result of high support from Democrats, obviously, but also solid numbers from independents and even Republicans. (Obama had 29 percent approval from GOP voters in May 2009.) Biden, however, dropped from his high of 57 percent approval in January 2021 to a dismal 40 percent within a year. In January 2022, his approval among Republicans was just five percent, down from 11 percent when he took office, and his approval among independents was only 33 percent — just over half of what it was at the start of his term. He was also managing just 82 percent approval among his own party. Biden carried 53 percent of the popular vote in 2020, so his underwater approval wasn’t just from diehard MAGA cultists and Fox News viewers. The numbers showed that he’d quickly lost ground with former supporters. He never really regained it.
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So, what happened in 2021 to tank Biden’s standing? Some have blamed his sudden decline in popularity on the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was chaotic and cost 13 American soldiers their lives. That certainly played a large role, but the slide actually started before then. Biden’s approval fell from 53 percent at the start of June to 43 percent by Labor Day. In May, Biden announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear masks, but the delta variant soon put the brakes on the White House’s promised “summer of joy.” The CDC quickly reversed its public guidance and recommended indoor mask wearing for everyone, including the vaccinated. Meanwhile, as the economy steadily recovered from the pandemic thanks in part to Biden’s American Rescue Plan, prices increased across the board and inflation surged past the Federal Reserve’s two percent target. Although Biden assured Americans that inflation was temporary, Republicans quickly blamed rising costs on Biden and Democratic policies. Unlike Afghanistan, these weren’t issues that faded from public consciousness with the next news cycle. In fact, they cemented the tone for the rest of the Biden administration. Biden had promised an end to the pandemic, and initially delivered and then some, but a return to mask mandates felt like a traumatic regression. And just as Americans were able to freely travel and gather indoors, they were hit with higher prices on basic necessities. On the legislative front, Dems had a trifecta, but Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema proved almost unmovable obstacles for major legislation that other Democrats were eager to support. (The robust 2021 child tax credit expired in December of that year, thanks to Manchin.) Worse for Biden and Democrats, benefits from the more impressive measures in the bipartisan infrastructure deal would take far too long to be felt by voters. According to a 2024 CNN presidential exit poll, a whopping 68 percent of voters thought the economy was “not good” or “poor.” This wasn’t just Republicans refusing to acknowledge a booming economy under a Democratic president. No, a good number of Democrats and independents contributed to that devastating figure. Consumers certainly weren’t behaving like they were in a recession, and real wages had outpaced inflation for most working Americans. Unfortunately, the grim reality for Democrats is that voters are more likely to blame the government for rising prices while taking all the credit for their own wage increases. The term “vibecession” was coined back in 2022 to describe public discontent with the economy despite overtly positive trends. However, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision in June of that year, many Democrats thought the blow to reproductive freedom would mobilize women against Republicans and make it difficult for them to win back the presidency in 2024. This turned out not to be the case. The prevailing wisdom was that Dobbs backlash would counteract Biden’s low approval, and certainly Democratic performance during the 2022 midterms bolstered that theory. Despite the GOP’s media-enabled hopes for a “red wave,” Democrats held the Senate (even adding a seat) and avoided massive losses in the House. It’s clear now, however, that Democrats did so in spite of Biden, who wasn’t on the ballot. (Democrats in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina also performed better than the presidential candidate last November.) The other massive elephant in the room that perhaps wasn’t fully understood by Biden-supporting Democrats coming out of the midterms is Trump’s established record of turning out irregular voters. As the Democratic coalition has come to include more high-information, college-educated suburban voters, Democratic strength in off year elections has become less predictive of their performance in presidential cycles. Trump has flipped the usual script. Nonetheless, Biden viewed the midterm results — the best for an incumbent president in decades — as a strong signal that he could win reelection, especially against Trump, who he’d already defeated and whose handpicked MAGA candidates had cost Republicans control of the Senate by bungling several winnable races. So Democrats dismissed the many calls in the media for Biden to step aside, including Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times in February 2023 (“Biden’s a Great President. He Should Not Run Again”) and David Ignatius at The Washington Post in September 2023 (“President Biden should not run again”). But those calls were coming from inside the house, as well: Polls consistently showed an overwhelming majority of voters didn’t want Biden to run again, including a majority of Democrats. The idea of Biden serving two terms and being president until he’s 86 years old was always going to be a very tough sell, especially considering that questions about his mental and physical decline were already swirling by late 2022. By February 2024, a whopping 86 percent of Americans thought he was too old to serve a second term. This was obviously an issue that it was beyond Biden’s power to resolve, so Democrats simply hoped voters would overlook it given the alternative, especially given that Trump is just a few years younger. If Biden hoped that the positive 2022 midterms result would put some wind in his sails, it quickly became clear he didn’t really have momentum after all. The loss of the House meant that his days of signing meaningful legislation were largely over, and he spent large chunks of 2023 with an approval rating below 40. (Biden’s inability to do more to stop the violence in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel also played a role in fracturing his 2020 coalition.) Biden’s approval rating was below 50 percent from July 2021 onward. (Gallup) The Biden campaign insisted up until the very end that as the election grew closer, voters would realize that Trump was wholly unfit to serve as commander in chief. Biden defenders pointed to the Democratic primary he’d won decisively, although it was mostly ceremonial and he didn’t face serious challengers at the level of Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis. Even worse, Trump’s approval started to improve in 2023 and the public impression of his catastrophic presidency grew more favorable — an indictment of the media and perhaps of a Biden administration that a majority of Americans found wanting. As Democratic influencer Will Stancil recently put it on social media, “Biden talked about his policy wins — especially the kitchen-table, infrastructure stuff — almost incessantly. The problem was that the media system was completely poisoned against him. It seems like the policy wins may not matter at all, even — it's just the media stuff.” Stancil’s frustration is understandable, if somewhat defeatist. Yes, the mainstream media held Biden and Kamala Harris to a higher standard than Trump, but voters who received their news through traditional sources ultimately broke for Harris. The problem is more that there was a communication vacuum, particularly in social media and the so-called “manosphere,” where Democrats disengaged from key segments of their coalition — young people in general and POC specifically. Pete Buttigieg scoring quick hits on Fox News is impressive but doesn’t move the needle where it counts. Also, Buttigieg isn’t the president, and his youthful eloquence arguably helped reinforce the GOP’s narrative that Biden was mentally diminished. | | How a right-coded media environment boosts Trump | | |
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The emerging new media environment was evident back in 2016, when Trump steamrolled over his Republican primary opponents with an unconventionally crude communication style and social media strategy. It was an approach that mainstream Republicans soon adopted. Biden’s decades of political experience might’ve served him well behind closed doors with the nuts and bolts of legislation, but he was ill-suited to lead the party in the messaging war that proved decisive last year. Democrats sneered at Trump’s often shameless self-promotion, like putting his name on covid stimulus checks, but Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t assume his New Deal policies would speak for themselves. He leveraged the media of the day to actively sell them, and he didn’t rely on surrogates. He was his administration’s most “visible” spokesman, while simultaneously hiding his own infirmity. The Ivy League-educated FDR came from a wealthy, old money New York family, but as president during the Great Depression, he presented himself as a plain-spoken man of the people through his carefully scripted “fireside chats” — the radio version of a modern podcast. As vice president, Kamala Harris’s approval rating usually matched Biden’s. She’s undoubtedly a better communicator that the president, and it’s possible she could’ve done better last November had she worked harder to distance herself from her administration — her inability or refusal to articulate a policy difference with Biden on The View has gone down as one of the more memorable mistakes of the 2024 campaign. Had Biden stepped aside after the midterms, primary voters might have chosen a nominee who wasn’t directly tied to an unpopular administration. But once he made the fateful decision to seek a second term and the media became fixated on his age, all the ingredients were in place for Trump’s return to power — even if Harris’s ascendancy to the top of the ticket in July of last year did provide Dems with a temporary jolt.
Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. But had you been told in January 2021 that over the next four years President Biden would organize an orderly vaccination rollout that brought the country out of the pandemic, preside over a historically strong jobs market and stock market, guide the economy out of post-covid inflation and into a “soft landing,” and sign a sweeping array of legislation into law, you would’ve thought for sure he cruised to a second term. And yet. The tragic irony is that if Trump is set to inherit a thriving economy, which he’ll claim he restored to its pre-2020 greatness through sheer force of will, and unfortunately, neither the mainstream media nor even his fellow Democrats are likely to spend the next four years defending Biden’s record. There’s an old saying that a first-term president’s most important task is to get reelected — everything else is secondary. To that end, quite bluntly, Biden came up short. And his failure is especially disastrous given that next week he’ll have to hand the White House keys back to the guy he portrayed in 2020 as an existential threat to the republic. (A portrayal Trump promptly validated with the January 6 coup attempt.) And yet all hope isn’t lost. Biden delivered a moving farewell speech Wednesday evening, signing off by saying, “After 50 years of public service, I give you my word: I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. A nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter. They must endure. Now it's your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it too.” (Watch below.) We’re no doubt in for some tough times. But if Joe Biden taught us anything, it’s that we should never, ever, give up.
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