Zach Carter doesn’t believe that the high inflation of the Biden years explains the president’s low job-approval numbers. He writes in Slate:
The 17.9 percent cumulative price increase across the first three years of Biden’s presidency is more comparable to Reagan’s (17 percent), Nixon’s (15.4 percent), and George H.W. Bush’s (14.1 percent) than it is to Carter’s (32.8 percent), and yet Biden is substantially less popular than all of these guys.
I don’t think inflation entirely explains these presidents’ approval ratings, but it’s not surprising that voters would judge Biden’s inflation more harshly than Reagan’s; nor is it irrational.
By the time Reagan took office, voters had experienced high inflation for a decade. They understood that Reagan had inherited high inflation and then brought it down. Biden, on the other hand, inherited an economy in which inflation had been low for a very long time. He packed roughly as much inflation into three years as there had been in the previous ten. Of course voters are holding it against him.