The 2024 Campaign Begun It Has

At FiveThirtyEight Geoffrey Skelley reviews why President Biden’s approval ratings are the lowest of any sitting president of recent memory. He considers three reasons:

• 75% of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track”.
• The economy, particularly inflation.
• The president hasn’t pushed issues that matter to some of his most important enough, particularly climate change and debt forgiveness.

Here’s a snippet from his article:

As it currently stands, polls suggest that Republicans as a whole are more enthusiastic than Democrats about the upcoming election, although most recent surveys asking that question predate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing abortion as a constitutional right. This is an issue that could be motivating for Democrats this fall, and in fact, we’ve already seen some movement toward Democrats in our generic ballot average. It remains to be seen, though, whether that’s a short-term blip or a more long-lasting change in the electoral environment, and of course someone who is unenthusiastic can still vote — an unenthusiastic vote counts the same as an enthusiastic one.

Nevertheless, the historical relationship between presidential approval and the performance of the president’s party in midterm elections should scare Democrats. Generally speaking, the worse a president’s approval is, the more seats that party tends to lose in the House.2 Thinking back to that first chart, three of the four presidents preceding Biden saw their party lose at least 40 House seats in their first midterm election. The exception was Bush, whose party actually gained six seats in the 2002 election, but he had an unusually high approval rating at the time of his first midterm. That’s still notable, though, because it means it has taken that kind of anomaly to see the president’s party suffer fewer losses — or even achieve gains — in House elections.

In the very first sentence of his Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove identifies some more:

Democratic midterm prospects are bad not only because of inflation, a slowing economy, rampant crime, the southern border crisis and culture clashes.

Unmentioned is the bad taste left by our leaving Afghanistan. It is possible to do the right thing in the wrong way and IMO evacuating Afghanistan is a prime example of that. Personally, I don’t blame Biden so much for that as I do three consecutive presidents who set unrealistic goals for Afghanistan and committed verbally to withdrawing from Afghanistan without actually doing it. I think they should have withdrawn from Afghanistan or levelled with the American people, telling them we had no intention of leaving Afghanistan. That attitude is probably one of the many reasons they were president and I’m not.

Meanwhile, one of the things that puzzled me yesterday has been cleared up—President Biden’s trip to the Middle East. I now think it indicates that the 2024 campaign for president has begun and Biden is running. There’s nothing like foreign receptions by cheering crowds and being received by foreign heads of state to make a president look presidential. It’s not quite “wag the dog” but it’s in that general direction.

BTW, I have one bit of unsolicited and no doubt unwelcome advice to offer President Biden. His approval rating goes up when he’s out of the public eye and goes down when he makes a big policy speech. He might consider that the key to winning in 2024 might be to maintain a low profile. That pertains to his wife, one of his main surrogates, as well.