Wednesday’s Quinnipiac poll shows Biden’s approval rating continuing to flounder:
While 33 percent of Americans approve of the way President Biden is handling his job, 54 percent disapprove with 13 percent not offering an opinion. Biden’s 33 percent job approval ties the low that he received in a Quinnipiac University poll on January 12, 2022, when his job approval rating was a negative 33 – 53 percent.
One particularly notable aspect of the poll was Biden’s abysmal approval rating among Hispanics, which comes at a time when Democrats are hemorrhaging support from the demographic overall. According to Quinnipiac, just 26 percent of Hispanics approve “of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president,” compared to 54 percent who disapprove, and 20 percent who were surveyed as “don’t know/not applicable.” In contrast, Biden’s approval rating with whites was ranked at a slightly better — though still definitively negative — 31 percent favorability:
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Now, as some have pointed out, Quinnipiac’s numbers are typically worse for Biden than those that are given by other polling organizations. Quinnipiac “is the harshest of all pollsters toward Biden,” John Podhoretz noted on the Commentary podcast yesterday. “They come up with the results that are the worst for Biden,” and so “people who are thrilled to hear this news should keep their powder dry, because most other polls have him closer to 40 [percent approval rating overall], which is terrible, but nonetheless is not 33.”
Of course, recent years have shown that mainstream pollsters often overestimate support for Democrats, so Quinnipiac’s status as an outlier could feasibly be closer to the truth than many of its counterparts. But whether or not this poll is an accurate assessment of the American public’s feelings about the president, Biden’s tanking political prospects — particularly with Hispanics — can be measured in relative terms if you compare them with Quinnipiac’s numbers from two years ago. Out of curiosity, I dug up a Quinnipiac poll from April 8, 2020, to compare Biden’s standing with that of Donald Trump, which presumably was measured using a similar methodology. Two years ago, Quinnipiac showed Trump’s approval rating sitting at 41 percent favorability and 52 percent unfavorability — eleven points underwater, as compared to Biden’s 21-point negative rating. (At the same time, Biden — who was on the cusp of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination at the time — was polling even at 43 percent favorability and 43 percent unfavorability, with 12 percent of respondents saying they “haven’t heard enough.”)
With Hispanics, the April 2020 poll ranked Trump’s approval rating as 32 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable — the same 28 percent spread that Quinnipiac now shows for Biden. Of course, approval ratings don’t map onto voting choices. Just because a particular demographic disapproves of Biden’s job performance doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him. But given the traditional Hispanic loyalty to the Democratic Party, these numbers point toward an ongoing rightward shift within the demographic that should worry the Left.