And speaking of cognitive dissonance, Gallup has found that Americans’ approval of Congress has declined to 18%:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ approval rating of the job Congress is doing has fallen to 18%, the lowest point in more than a year, as congressional Democrats’ efforts to pass spending and voting rights bills have stalled. The latest five-percentage-point decline in congressional approval is largely attributed to a 10-point decline among Democrats whose frustration appears to be mounting with their party’s senators and representatives who hold majorities in both houses of Congress.
Meanwhile, according to Gallup’s most recent update (2020) of approval of one’s own Congressional representative, that’s 59%. I wonder who people think Congress is?
Update
According to the RCP Average of Polls, the spread between President Joe Biden’s approval rating and his disapproval rating is the greatest of his presidency. It’s -14.8. He’s “underwater” as they put it. It’s not quite as bad as Trump’s was in the immediate aftermath of the breaching of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 but it’s flirting with it.
Update 2
At Mediate Joe DePaolo reports that 37% of Americans give Joe Biden a failing grade for his first year in office while only 11% give him an “A”:
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll out Wednesday, 37 percent of respondents give the president an “F†for the first quarter of his presidency. By contrast, a meager 11 percent give Biden an “A†thus far, while 20 percent give him a “B.†Nearly a third of the country put Biden in the “C†or “D†category — with 18 percent giving the president a “C†and 12 percent giving him a “D.â€
At this point in his term, Biden’s failing grade exceeds even former President Donald Trump’s. The 45th president got an “F†from 35 percent of Americans, compared to Biden’s 37 percent.
Biden got his worst marks on the economy, immigration, and “restoring unity†— with 40 percent flunking him in the latter two categories, and 38 percent giving him an “F†on the economy. His best grades came on Covid-19 and health care, where 35 percent and 31 percent respectively gave him an “A†or a “B.â€
That means that 49% of Americans gave him an F or a D and only 31% an A or B. I think attributing that to partisanship alone is a stretch.
Just to put things in perspective.
Using RCP, Biden at the 41% approval about where Trump was at his first anniversary as President; Obama polled about the same in early 2014, Bush actually polled below 40 from late 2005 (post Katrina) to 2008. RCP didn’t exist in the 90’s, but Clinton probably polled in the low 40’s before the 94 elections.
As for Congress, its actually in the middle of the range of approval for the past 10 years.
The point is Biden and Congress’s approval are not historical outliers. All Presidents run a stretch where they have terrible ratings; most Presidents bounce back. Clinton and Obama got their approval back over 50, Trump got his highest approval rating just before the pandemic. Bush is the example when it doesn’t bounce back.
People like their Congressman because his office seems to make federal agencies snap to and deliver, he gets funding for local projects and appoints local youth to full ride scholarships at the military academies.
But in aggregate, Congress seems to be attentive filling every one’s bread basket but theirs.
Biden’s ratings seem to decline the more leftward he goes. But who knows. Could be he does not talk much about helping pay Covid related ER and hospital bills or he needs to call the hoarders and profiteers behind the supply chain woes and inflation.
For Covid I think he should give up trying to browbeat anyone or even persuade anyone to get vaccinated. I think he just puts top this chart once a week and lets it speak for itself. 13 times more likely to test positive for covid if you are unvaccinated. 68 times more likely to die.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
Steve
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipiac-poll-shows-biden-with-33-percent-approval-rating
The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Biden’s approval number down to 33%. Whether this is an outlier or not, the trend, nonetheless, for Biden has been consistently downward. Other indications of the disappointment in his presidency are negative approval numbers in almost all categories including the economy, immigration, handling of COVID etc. Right tract/wrong tract are not good either, with only 27% thinking we are on the right tract. Also the “are you better off this year than last year†question has him in dismal territory as well.
While CO buffers Biden’s sliding numbers with his “perspective†post, comparing and contrasting his diminished numbers with other presidents, I believe people are turning against Biden mainly because of his awful policies and Presidential performance, not his likability, such as was the case for Trump. With 94% of the news stories being negative ones, from the get go, Trump always had a stiff wind of resentment, hostility, false accusations in front of him, blowing away any chances of having an amicable image in his presidency. Good Trump policies were either underreported or merely ignored. Controversial moves and tweets were accentuated and headlined everywhere. This is all people heard, morning, noon and night.
Biden, OTOH, came into office with the press cheering him on, overlooking his endless (sometimes racist) gaffes, son’s opportunistic and druggy behavior, his own questionable finances, and lackluster lifelong career in DC, all because he had vanquished Trump (although 40% of the public still aren’t sold on his legitimacy). It has only been after an avalanche of embarrassing, incompetent, irrational, stupid Executive actions and policies that he is finally having eyebrows raised and a media forced to admit what a bad job Joe Biden is doing!
What you refuse to acknowledge, steve, is that people make a more wholistic evaluation.
First, 68x a small number is still a small number, especially when you consider that mortality is concentrated and governed pretty much in descending order by age, diabetes, morbid obesity, compromised immunity, cardiac arrhythmia and CHF. That population will have a very different perspective than the general population.
Second, some people have value systems more oriented towards personal liberty and choice. Further, they consider the substantial costs of policies that might drive risk towards zero.
And before you go on about personal responsibility. Patients are advised to avoid trans fats, sugar and alcohol. Yet they consume them, at cost to the general population. They shouldn’t drink and drive, but they do. They should maintain a healthy weight and exercise, but they don’t, at a cost to the general population. Every year normal flue gets spread by people to susceptible people. I could go on.
It is only covid that that has reached an exalted status requiring people to be fired, held out of school, harmed by delayed cancer or other disease screenings, economies to be crushed. We all know why. Politics, and the puppet public health officials have failed miserably the last two years.
“What you refuse to acknowledge, steve, is that people make a more wholistic evaluation.”
No they dont. There is no metric where covid is not much worse.
“Second, some people have value systems more oriented towards personal liberty and choice.”
But the choice is to not get vaccinated which is free and devoid of significant risks (many magnitudes lower than the risks you mention above) and the liberty is to infect others.
“It is only covid that that …..” can have its risk largely eliminated by a free, incredibly safe vaccine. We know why people are not getting vaccinated. Politics.
BTW, about 1/4 of covid deaths are under the age of 65. As always, you dont want to talk about morbidities unless it relates to vaccine complications where again morbidities from covid far outweigh anything from the vaccines.
Steve