Adam Wren of Politico notes, “a Morning Consult-Bloomberg poll found voters trust Trump more than Biden on infrastructure 43-37 percent—despite the historic bipartisan infrastructure law.”
You can almost hear the Biden staffers fuming. “How can that guy, with his endless Infrastructure Weeks, be trusted more on infrastructure than our guy, who signed a $1 trillion bill?”
Perhaps it is related to the fact that even Biden is irritated at the slow pace of these construction projects, with construction still not having started on some of them, two years after the bill was signed into law. Or the reports that despite budgeting $7.5 billion for the task, no new electric-vehicle chargers were built in the first two years. Or the evidence that, “at nearly every turn, the infrastructure package opted for policies that limited supplies, hiked prices, added paperwork, and grew government.”
But rather than specific gripes about infrastructure projects, I suspect that for a lot of voters, Biden’s age is just an all-encompassing concern that colors their perception of how he’s doing on every issue. If something good is happening, Biden isn’t likely to get a lot of credit because many voters perceive him as doddering and out of it and not really in charge of his own administration. (Think of all the times Biden says his staff won’t allow him to take questions, etc. It’s hard to tell whether Biden is joking.)
For example, a new poll from the Wall Street Journal finds that voter perceptions of the economy are improving:
Some 31 percent of voters in the survey said the economy had gotten better over the past two years, during the majority of Biden’s tenure, a rise of 10 percentage points from a Journal poll in December. And 43 percent said their personal finances are headed in the right direction, a 9-point increase from the prior survey.
But few respondents are giving President Biden much credit for it.
Some 37 percent now approve of Biden’s handling of inflation, up 7 points from the December survey, and 40 percent approve of his handling of the economy overall, a 4-point increase that is within the poll’s margin of error.
Those findings, while suggesting improvement for the president, still show that voters hold a dim view of his stewardship of the economy. Moreover, his re-election prospects are weighed down by concerns about his age and sharply negative views of his leadership overall, including his handling of immigration and the war between Israel and Hamas.
Some 73 percent say Biden is too old, at age 81, to stand for re-election, the same share as in an August Journal poll. By comparison, 52 percent see Trump, age 77, as too old to run for the White House, up 5 points from August. Biden last week received a clean bill of health in his annual physical, with his doctor calling him “fit for duty.”
Biden fans may well find the voters’ mindsets unfair. If something goes wrong on Biden’s watch, it reflects his being a wobbling old man who tires easily and can’t remember much. If something goes right, voters perceive it as a coincidence or conclude some other factor is primarily responsible for the good news.
But this is what happens when an 81-year-old guy chooses to run for another term, and clearly can’t handle anything resembling the traditional presidential schedule. Biden’s last public event was 1 p.m. Friday afternoon, a meeting with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. He had no public events Saturday or Sunday and none are scheduled for today. He has to rest up in preparation for Thursday’s State of the Union Address, of course.