Analysis: Biden’s political fortunes are riding on congressional Democrats passing major deals
Biden must hope that something gets passed — his and his party’s political fortunes could depend on it.
Biden’s approval rating has been sinking the last few months and is down to only about 45% in an average of polls. The decline can be linked to many things, including the pullout of troops from Afghanistan and a rise in coronavirus cases.
These percentages are far worse than they were for Biden back in April. Back then, more Americans (51%) thought Biden had done a great or fair amount than little or some (47%).
The two bills before Congress provide a strong opportunity for Biden to be seen as doing something. There’s the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that has already passed the Senate, and the $3.5 trillion spending package that contains funding for universal pre-K, expansion of Medicare and clean energy.
Issue polling isn’t as cut and dry as polling about elections, but the bills seem more popular than not.
The infrastructure bill came out 51% favor vs. 20% oppose, while the spending bill was 49% favor to 25% oppose.
About a quarter of the electorate remained undecided on both, but these polls generally follow what most of the public data has shown: voters are in favor of Biden and the Democrats passing something.
Now, there’s no guarantee that these bills will make Biden more popular. The linkage between legislation passing and presidential popularity isn’t one-to-one, and there still are plenty of Americans undecided on the bills. But either of these bills passing may not need to make Biden more popular in order to have a desirable outcome for Democrats.
For one thing, there has been a steady beat of bad news cycles for Biden for over a month. Initially, it was rising coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant. Then it was the exit from Afghanistan. Now, it’s a Democratic Party that can’t seem to line up together to actually get something done.
Merely showing that they can do something can’t hurt — and likely helps — Democrats.
Part of the reason Democratic backers may not be enthusiastic is that Biden and his fellow Democrats haven’t given them a lot of reason to turn out in 2022.
One has to imagine that if an unpopular tax cut helped Trump rally his base, then a bill that is more popular has at least some chance of doing the same with Biden and his base.
