When Barack Obama entered office, his approvals ranged the first month at 68-78% nationally. It normalized a year in to about 48-55%.
When Joe Biden walked into office, the approval rating was only about 50-55% and now stands at 38-42%.
Joe Biden & Barack Obama are pretty similar, as presidents who entered into a crisis and looking at the numbers, Joe Biden is doing a stronger job.
Lower unemployment
More jobs created
Income growth showing better signs.
Joe Biden showed vastly higher COVID vaccine numbers over projected, did ultimately keep his Afghanistan promise and it seems like things are getting better. Obvious price issues happening, but nothing really a clear fault of Biden.
So, what’s the issue?
Best way to sum this up would go back to Game of Thrones.
In the first season of Game of Thrones, Robert Baratheon goes ask Cersei a question.
What’s stronger, one army or five?
Cersei says five.
He shows five fingers, saying five.
After that, he shows a fist and says one.
This is a pretty accurate description of the Democrats vs Republicans right now.
Best example of this would be how the primaries worked in 2020.
Joe Biden won the primary by what overall a solid win, with 52% to Bernie Sanders in second at 26%, but the issue was just how split that really was.
Biden bombed the early primary states, failing to come in the top three in either Iowa or New Hampshire.
The other issue is how spread out it was with the DNC as a whole.
Michael Bloomberg & Elizabeth Warren tied at 7%.
One is a multi billionaire moderate.
The other is a hard left senator with an academic background.
Neither really fit and don’t seem like really part of the same DNC.
Breaking this down, the DNC gets weirder and weirder, where Democrats seem to have a minimum of five different branches.
Regular democrats
The hard left
Moderates
Union democrats
Silicon Valley democrats
All kind of broken down with different issues that concern them such as criminal justice, single payer, immigration and more.
Gets weird.
The GOP on the other hand really has everyone behind one person right now and that’s Donald Trump.
Trump had three primary opponents in 2020 with Governor Bill Weld, Governor Mark Sanford and Congressman Joe Walsh.
None of them ever for one day polled over 3% and Trump won reelection with 90% of the vote. I personally like Sanford, Walsh and Weld, but all grossly embarrassed and they just wasted time/money.
If Joe Biden had a primary now from someone such as AOC, Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders or a high profile hard left person, they’d poll over 35% on day one in a primary.
Even another more regular Democrat such as Amy Klobucher or Cory Booker would likely break 20-30% against Biden in polls.
This is where I see the issue.
I think Joe Biden is all things considered doing a good job.
I just think he’s in a spot where he has 2-3 of the 5 armies on his side and Trump’s one army is 100% against him.
This makes a really rough spot where reelection can get tough if a united DNC doesn’t get to him.