On the menu today: You might think that, at this point, Joe Biden must have hit bottom in his job approval rating, but a Monmouth University poll finds him down to 36 percent. What’s notable about the polling lately is how many Democrats can no longer convince themselves that Biden is doing a good job. A lot of this is driven by the runaway-inflation crisis, and there’s a real problem for Democrats, in that the $1.9 trillion in new spending enacted in March 2021 — a massive spending bill that Larry Summers explicitly warned would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation” — was passed on party-line votes. As they approach a red tsunami midterm, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.
A Dark Day for Biden in the Polls
Normal Democrats are increasingly open about their disappointment with President Biden. Yesterday, the Monmouth University national poll had Biden’s job approval down to 36 percent. If you follow politics, you know the usual split in these polls by party. Usually only about 10 percent of the opposition-party respondents approve of the job the president is doing, usually almost all of the members of the president’s party approve, and independents are usually roughly evenly split.
In the Monmouth poll, just 3 percent of Republicans, 29 percent of independents, and 74 percent of Democrats approved of the job Biden is doing. The survey found that 19 percent of Democrats were willing to tell a pollster they didn’t approve of the job Biden was doing, and another 7 percent volunteered that they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.
In other words, roughly a quarter of Democrats can’t bring themselves to say, “Yes, he’s doing fine.”
One of the more buzz-generating moves in the past week or so was California governor Gavin Newsom’s running an ad in Florida, which was almost certainly aimed at getting national attention. It was also probably aimed to trigger an angry Truth Social post from former president Trump and response from Florida governor Ron DeSantis, or ideally both. On paper, Newsom is running for reelection in the Golden State, but the ad is a not-so-subtle hint to Democrats across the country that if they want to reconsider their presidential options for 2024, he’s available and interested.
When a president is doing badly, members of his party always like to tell themselves that the problem is that they’re on the defensive and that they need to go on the attack. One of the easy ways for an ambitious politician to stand out is to pose as a fighter and denounce the rest of the party as squishes and sellouts — think of Howard Dean shouting that he represented “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” In fact, almost every rising star in U.S. politics in the past decade has adopted some version of the “I’m the real fighter for a party that desperately needs one” pose: Trump, DeSantis, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC.
This “Our problem is that we just don’t attack enough” mentality is usually self-deluding nonsense, and that is the case for Democrats now. The problem for Joe Biden is not that Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Brian Kemp, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, or other figures associated with the political Right are not being attacked enough. The problem for Joe Biden is that he’s doing a lousy job, and Americans are feeling the consequences.
Biden is doing a lousy job for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that the U.S. inflation rate is currently at 8.6 percent, has been high since last fall, and isn’t likely to dramatically improve anytime soon. Even worse, Biden spent much of 2021 publicly insisting that inflation would be “temporary” or “transitory.” Inflation is high for several reasons, but a major factor was that the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress agreed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion on “Covid relief” in March 2021, as the vaccines were arriving and the economy was already recovering.
A small handful of Democrats warned — loudly — that throwing a ton of money into the economy as it was getting back to normal would light the fuse on inflation. In a February 4, 2021, Washington Post op-ed, former treasury secretary Larry Summers warned that, “There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability” (emphasis added). Then he declared shortly after the bill’s passage that, “I think this is the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.” As The Hill noted at the time, “Summers’s remarks are notable because Biden has received almost no pushback from Democrats in pursuit of his legislation.”
Just about the entire Democratic Party rejected Summers’s warnings. All 220 House Democrats voted to pass the massive spending package; all 210 Republicans voted against it. Every Senate Democrat voted to pass it; every Senate Republican voted against it. Rarely do you see such a stark and clear partisan divide on a piece of legislation.
In other words, the country is in brutally rough shape right now, in large part because of legislation that the entire Democratic Party, except for Representative Jared Golden of Maine, voted to enact. And this was legislation that just about every self-identified Democrat supported, too; a CNN poll from March 2021 found that 94 percent of self-identified Democrats favored it.
The hot economic idea in progressive circles for the past few years has been “modern monetary theory” — the notion that because the U.S. Treasury creates the money, the federal government can spend as much as it likes year after year, and everything will turn out just fine. To the extent that young progressives thought about economics, they believed that the federal government could spend as much as it liked — not just on the American Rescue Plan and an infrastructure bill, but on Build Back Better and the Green New Deal. In their minds, only lame old-fashioned nervous nellies believed that excessive government spending could have bad or even catastrophic effects upon the economy.
Lo and behold, those lame old-fashioned nervous nellies knew what they were talking about.
Democrats want to think about Gavin Newsom and the joy of “going on the attack against Republicans” because it’s too depressing for them to think about what is actually going on in the country under the president they nominated and under the policies they wanted.
A lot of Americans are hurting right now; 42 percent of respondents in that Monmouth poll said they are struggling to remain where they are financially, 57 percent said that the actions of the federal government over the past six months have hurt their family when it comes to their most important concern, and 54 percent said the middle class has not benefited at all from Biden’s policies.
What is most bitter to the Democrats is that lots of Americans are hurting because Democrats got what they wanted — and they were specifically warned about the danger of runaway inflation and dismissed the warnings. The Democrats got their way, and everybody ended up in worse shape.
Of course Democrats are depressed right now. They should feel depressed right now. It turns out that the world does not work the way they thought it did. Hard truths are metaphorically punching Democrats in the face, every time they go to fill up their tank, shop for groceries, and see the new monthly inflation numbers come out. The government cannot spend money and throw trillions upon trillions into the economy without setting off inflationary pressures. This means that Build Back Better would only make things worse, as would the Green New Deal or any other trillion-dollar spending spree.
Democrats could confront the hard truth that their preferred economic agenda has serious drawbacks and go back to the drawing board, accounting for this reality. But that’s unpleasant, so they’ll choose to fantasize about Gavin Newsom running in 2024 and “going on the attack.”
Oh, and there’s one other wrinkle in that Monmouth poll that should splash cold water on the notion that the repeal of Roe v. Wade will be some sort of game-changer for the midterm elections:
Nearly half of the public names either inflation (33 percent) or gas prices (15 percent) as the biggest concern facing their family right now. The economy in general (9 percent) and paying everyday bills (6 percent) are among other financial concerns mentioned. Abortion, which has registered less than 1 percent on this question in prior Monmouth polls going back to 2015, is currently named by 5 percent – predominantly among Democrats (9 percent).
In a national poll of adults, taken right as the Supreme Court’s decision was announced and in the days that immediately followed, abortion was the top concern . . . of 9 percent of Democrats.
Back in May, I doubted that abortion would displace inflation and gas prices as top concerns among voters. I was assured by Twitter commenters that this was just because abortion was settled law and that a Supreme Court decision would make it a much higher priority.
ADDENDUM: Our Charlie Cooke is slowly and methodically laying out a glaring problem with “red flag” laws: They don’t do any good if police and family members don’t use them when they’re most clearly needed. Apparently, the Highland Park shooter “had a collection of knives confiscated by police in 2019 after he threatened to ‘kill everyone’ at his house, police said.” Charlie points to at least four potential crimes that the Highland Park shooter could have been charged with; what’s more, the circumstances of that 2019 interaction with police make the shooter seem like a natural candidate to be involuntarily hospitalized for mental-health treatment.
But he was not arrested, charged with any crime, or sent for involuntary mental-health treatment, and no one involved thought to put the confiscation of his knives or threats into the National Instant Check System. And “the suspect legally purchased the rifle used in the attack in Illinois within the past year,” police said.