Why Is President Biden’s Approval Rating So High?

I think that Zachary D. Carter has the wrong end of the stick in his piece at Slate, musing over why President Biden’s approval rating is so low:

In January of 1980, Jimmy Carter had been in office for three years, and the economy was terrible. Cumulatively, consumer prices were up more than 32 percent since he had entered the White House, and they had been rising steadily for more than 18 months. The unemployment rate was on the rise, after averaging 6.3 percent across his time in office. Wages, adjusted for inflation, had been falling for a year, gas prices were surging, and the interest rate on a typical home mortgage was over 15 percent. Things were very bad, and getting worse.

In the most preposterous corners of American economic discourse, Biden’s economy is still being compared to Carter’s, even though by every available metric, the 1970s were in a miserable league of their own, and today’s economy is among the most prosperous on record. Biden isn’t just clearing the low bar set by the Carter administration, he’s besting every other leader in the developed world, with the United States enjoying stronger wages, lower inflation, and better job growth than any nation in the G7, and its best labor market in at least half a century.

It’s interesting that he should characterize Lawrence Summers as “preposterous”. Hasn’t Dr. Summers been consistently and persistently critical of President Biden’s economic policy? To assess the validity of the comparison all you need do is compare the price of gasoline in January 2021 ($2.25/gallon) with the price today ($3.47). You could go through a similar exercise for a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a pound of hamburger, your automobile insurance, etc.

The reality of being president is that presidents get blamed for what happens during their terms of office (“their watch”) regardless of whether they’re own actions were responsible and far from being the return to normalcy (so to speak) on which Candidate Biden ran, he has presided over the fastest increase in inflation in the last 40 years, the start of two wars in which we are embroiled if not actually at war, more deaths due to COVID-19 than in the previous three and a half years, and more migration across our southern border than during his predecessor’s term.

I could go on. Keep in mind that Mr. Biden ran for president twice before (in 1988 and 2008) and was rejected soundly by Democrats in the primaries. I would submit that he was elected this time around because just enough people in just enough places saw him as better than Trump.

Consequently, I think that rather than asking why President Biden’s approval rating is so low he should be asking why is it so high? His RCP Poll Average is 39.8% Clearly, he has significantly more favorable press coverage than his predecessor experienced. Why else?