I’m never sure what to make of these polls asking folks if they approve of the job a president is doing.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-sinking-stone-uaw-members-staying-sidelines

Despite all the nonstop “news” channels, there isn’t much coverage and analysis of the policies, let alone the day to day operational work, of the POTUS.

Whenever I decide I want to form an opinion about some aspect of it, I find I need to devote a lot of time and energy reading detailed news articles and explanations about the issue just to get the lay of the land.

Did Biden screw up the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Superficially it looks so. But why did the Taliban overrun faster than analysts had expected? Is that a West Wing error? Once that happened, what other options were available? Blah blah blah.

And yet it seems to me that random people on the street don’t have a clue about what NATO is, or how much who contributes to it, or whether a government shutdown would be the fault of democrats in the legislature, and if so, is Biden to blame, etc.

So if people are for the most part uninvolved and incurious, how can they have an opinion on whether the president is doing a good job? Why do they even want to say they do? Why don’t they say “I don’t keep up with that, I’m too busy, so I don’t have an opinion; ask me the month before the next election”.

You can’t just look at what he’s doing (which I don’t very much in detail and I think most people do even less); you also need to consider hard-to-surmise counterfactuals. I’m not an expert in international relations strategy and domestic policy wonkish details about all the things a president needs to know.

When did “I don’t know” become not the default opinion about stuff we can’t keep up with?