President Biden’s job approval rating is on the downslope. As of Friday morning he was at 45.8 percent approval and 48.5 percent disapproval — from a high of 54 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval at the end of his first 100 days.
There is a laundry list of reasons for this. Not only is the United States still in the grip of a pandemic, but also the Delta variant of the coronavirus has led to record infections and deaths in Florida, Texas and other states with relatively low vaccination rates (and where officials have taken a stand against mitigation efforts). At the same time that Delta took hold, Biden also faced a huge backlash from the press and his partisan opponents over the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in chaotic fashion with the collapse of the Afghan National Army, the subsequent advance of the Taliban and of course the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members.
The administration quickly adjusted to the chaos, though, and by the time the last American soldiers left on Monday, the U.S. military and its allies had evacuated around 124,000 people, including thousands of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan nationals. And as seen in the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy is growing at a slower rate than it did at the start of the summer.
Taken together, you have a pretty good explanation for why Biden is doing much worse with the public than he was at the beginning of the year.
With that said, there’s another dynamic at work, one that should guide our expectations for how popular Biden is and how popular he could become. Put simply, we’re still quite polarized.
One of the most consistent findings from the past 20 years of public opinion research is that each new president is more divisive than the last. George W. Bush was more divisive than Bill Clinton; Barack Obama was more divisive than Bush; Donald Trump was more divisive than Obama; and Biden may well end up more divisive than Trump, at least in terms of approval rating by partisan affiliation. Some of this reflects circumstances, some of it reflects the individuals, but most of it is a function of partisan and ideological polarization. Modern presidents have a high floor for public opinion but a low ceiling.
This is a major change from the 1970s and 1980s, when the public was less polarized and numbers could swing from the low 30s (even the 20s) to the high 60s and beyond. At the peak of his popularity, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, George H.W. Bush had a job approval rating of 89 percent, including 82 percent among Democrats and 88 percent among independents. Those numbers are just not possible in today’s environment.
Biden’s slide is noteworthy, but it is also exactly what we should expect given the structural conditions of American politics in the 21st century. But this cuts against the unstated assumption that a president should have an approval rating above 50 percent. It’s an assumption that, as Sam Goldman, a professor of political science at George Washington University, observed, is “another example of how we’ve adopted the deeply exceptional midcentury interlude as our baseline — partly because it remains our vision of normality, and partly because that’s when reliable data start.”
The “deeply exceptional midcentury interlude” — roughly speaking the years between the end of World War II and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 — is the source of a lot of our normative understandings of American politics, despite the fact that the conditions of that period are impossible to replicate. When politicians and political observers pine for an era of bipartisanship, they are pining for the 1950s and 1960s (and to an extent the 1970s).
If we were to look farther back in time, to say, the late 19th century, we might find an era that, for all of its indelible foreignness, is closer to ours in terms of the shape and structure of its politics, from its sharp partisan polarization and closely contested national elections to its democratic backsliding and deep anxieties over immigration and demographic change.
We don’t have polling data for President Grover Cleveland. But we do know that he won his victory in the 1884 election by 37 votes in the Electoral College and a half-a-percent in the national popular vote. His successor, Benjamin Harrison, lost the popular vote by a little less than 1 percent and won the Electoral College by 65 votes. Those narrow results suggest, I think, a similarly narrow spread for presidential approval — high floors, low ceilings.
American politics eventually broke out of its late-19th-century equilibrium of high polarization and tightly contested elections. In the 1896 presidential election, William McKinley became the first candidate in decades to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote, beating his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, by 4.3 percent. He won re-election in 1900 and after his assassination the following year, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, would win in 1904 by the most lopsided margin since Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 re-election victory.
What changed in American politics to produce more decisive national victories? Well, that’s not a happy story. Suffrage restrictions of immigrants in the North, the rise of Jim Crow in the South, and the success of capital in suppressing labor revolt and setting the terms of political contestation had removed millions of Americans from the electorate by the turn of the 20th century. Political power was concentrated and consolidated in a bourgeois class (mostly) represented by the Republican Party, which, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s twin victories in 1912 and 1916, held the White House from 1897 to 1933. It would take another catastrophe, the Great Depression, to change that landscape.
As for the tectonic force that might break our partisan and ideological stalemate? It is impossible to say. Oftentimes in history, things seem stable until, suddenly, they aren’t.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was on the possibility that Republican resistance to vaccines and other mitigation efforts is akin to a deliberate strategy to undermine President Biden’s standing with the public.
Rather than work with him to vaccinate the country, Biden’s Republican opposition has, with only a few exceptions, done everything in its power to politicize vaccination and make refusal to cooperate a test of partisan loyalty. The party is, for all practical purposes, pro-Covid. If it’s sincere, it is monstrous. And if it’s not, it is an unbelievably cynical and nihilistic strategy. Unfortunately for both Biden and the country, it appears to be working.
My Friday column was on the new Texas abortion ban, the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” and the threat unrestrained judicial power poses to self-government.
The shadow docket aside, the extent to which political outcomes in America rest on the opaque machinations of a cloistered, nine-member clique is the clearest possible sign that we’ve given too much power to this institution. We can have self-government or we can have rule by judge, but we cannot have both.
Now Reading
Zeeshan Aleem interviews Anand Gopal on the war in Afghanistan, for MSNBC.
David Dayen on America’s governance crisis in The American Prospect.
Adolph Reed Jr. on the current crisis of democracy at Nonsite.org.
Sheri Berman on democratic reform in Dissent magazine.
Sara Lipton on the history of the “blood libel” in The New York Review of Books.
John Mueller asks in Responsible Statecraft whether the United States even needed to invade Afghanistan.
Photo of the Week
Longtime readers will know that I am enamored of classic cars and will seek out car shows in the area. I took this photo at a show near Lovingston, Va., about 40 minutes south of Charlottesville. It was a blisteringly hot day, but somehow also a perfect afternoon for checking out cool cars.
Now Eating: Caramelized Zucchini Pasta
A friend recently asked how he could use up the huge amount of zucchini he has from his garden, and this recipe is the ticket. With a little time and patience, you can turn two or three or four pounds of zucchini into a truly delicious pasta sauce. Makes for a perfect light dinner (with a crisp green salad) or a more substantive lunch. You can also serve with a protein. I’m a fan of fish with pasta, and a pan-fried trout would fit the vibe. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.
Ingredients
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2 tablespoons unsalted butter
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2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
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2 pounds zucchini, coarsely grated
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8 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
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½ cup basil leaves, stems reserved, plus more for serving
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kosher salt and black pepper
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1 pound ridged or curly pasta
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½ cup finely grated Parmesan or pecorino (about ½ ounce), plus more for serving
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1 tablespoon lemon juice
Directions
In a large (at least 12-inch) skillet over medium-high heat, melt the butter and oil. When it’s foaming, add the zucchini, garlic, basil stems and half the basil leaves. Season with 1¼ teaspoons salt and a few grinds of pepper. Cover and cook until pooling with liquid, 5 to 7 minutes. Uncover and cook until the liquid evaporates and the zucchini starts to sizzle, 7 to 10 minutes.
Continue to cook until the zucchini is very soft, dark green and reduced to about 1 cup, another 20 to 25 minutes. When you see a buildup of browned bits on the skillet, add a couple of tablespoons of water and stir, scraping up the browned bits. Repeat anytime more browning occurs. If you see burning, deglaze with water and lower the heat. (Caramelized zucchini can be made ahead and refrigerated for up to a week; it also freezes well.)
Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. When the zucchini is about done, add the pasta to the boiling water and cook until al dente. Reserve 2 cups of pasta water, then drain the pasta. If the zucchini is ready before the pasta, keep cooking it; the zucchini will only get better the longer it cooks.
When the pasta’s drained, remove the herb stems from the zucchini. Reduce the heat on the zucchini to medium, then add the pasta, 1 cup pasta water and the Parmesan. Stir until the pasta is glossed with sauce. Add more pasta water as needed to thin the sauce. Stir in the lemon juice and remaining basil, then season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with more basil, Parmesan and black pepper.
"Opinion" - Google News
September 04, 2021 at 10:00PM
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Opinion | Biden's Job Approval Rating Is on the Downslope - The New York Times
"Opinion" - Google News
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