What Do Precessing President Joe Biden Really Know About the Senate? An Analysis of His Presidency Positions in Biden’s First Term
The dominant narrative in American politics has been that President Joe Biden and the Democrats are back to their winning ways.
Their odds of keeping the Senate look better than they did earlier in the midterm cycle and there are even some pundits who suggest Democrats might be able to eke out a House majority.
What’s more, Biden’s position is consistently weak across the battleground states that will decide control of the Senate. CNN polls in Arizona and Nevada last week showed just 41% of likely voters in each approving of his performance. In Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, he’s approval is 39%, 39% and 45%, respectively.
Where does Biden rank historically at this point in his presidency? We can use Gallup to track the standing of Biden predecessors in the final stretch before the election in their first term.
An analysis shows that the average House seat loss is 37 for a president with a job approval of less than 50%. The average seat loss for presidents with approval north of 50% is 14.
The impact of Biden’s misapproval on the Democratic candidates in the decisive states of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives
One of the most important factors is that many voter groups that Democrats rely upon are more focused on issues where public confidence in Biden is lowest, and more focused on issues with greater GOP fears. Ayres says the blue team cares about abortion and democrats while the red team cares about crime and immigration. It appears that there is a little overlap on the inflation front. But we have become so polarized that the two different teams care about different things and are motivated by different things.”
Exit polls showed that Manchin, Tester, Brown, and Sinema captured higher percentages of voters who approved of Trump than their Republican opponent did. Now Democratic candidates in the decisive states face the reverse challenge: they must win a higher share of voters who disapprove of Biden than their Republican opponent wins among the voters who approve of him.
The Republican consultant says that voters decided to protest after the Supreme Court decided to overturn the abortion law. He argues that they realized they couldn’t afford gas to get there. He says that it has shifted the priority for voters to the issue of abortion. Sure. But it’s not what it was weeks ago. It is putting pressure on some of the Democratic candidates who had been silent on abortion for a long time.
The Democrat has outspent his Republican opponent more than the other way around, so Kelly is benefiting from the campaign’s basics. Noble believes that some voters have already looked past the president in assessing the parties and that is part of the reason whyKelly is overcoming disenchantment with Biden. “The [president’s] job approval, for whatever reason, is not having as much effect,” Noble says. “People have accepted it’s Joe Biden, and pat him on the head, push him along, so you are not seeing that direct connection” to the Senate vote.
The four Democrats who won in states that voted for Donald Trump show it is still possible for personal opinions about Senate candidates to surpass those about the country and the president. In 2020 Susan Collins won reelection in a state where a large number of disapproving voters voted for her anyway, an example of how important it is for politicians to get the support of the voters who disapprove of them.
More than half of the voters who focused on inflation gave Republicans two-thirds of their votes for Congress. But Democrats attracted about three-fourths of those who emphasized abortion or health care, and over three-fifths of those focused on preserving democracy.
Democrats are concerned about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his movement but also about the rights and values of others, given the differences. Since June, as CNN recently reported, Democratic candidates have spent over $130 million on abortion-themed ads, vastly more than Republicans.
The 2020 Census of Hispanics and Other Industries: The Case of Manufacturing, Healthcare and the Future of the American Economy in the 21st Century
In the long run, the most important of these may be the argument that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the trio of central Biden legislative accomplishments – the bills to rebuild infrastructure, promote semiconductor manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy – will produce a boom in US employment, particularly in manufacturing jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Only a few Democrats are talking about those plant openings this year, because they are mostly still in the future.
More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says that highlighting such specific initiatives can allow individual candidates to overcome the negative overall judgment on Biden’s economic management. His main concern is that too many Democrats are sublimating any economic message while focusing preponderantly on abortion.
The Democrats are trying to build a sea wall against the growing economic discontent because of the coming manufacturing boom, cost-saving provisions of the inflation reduction act and the case that they are offering struggling families opportunities to better their condition. The campaign’s final weeks will measure whether that level of current surpasses all the party’s defenses.
Among likely Hispanic voters, a narrow 48 percent plurality disapproved of Mr. Biden even as 60 percent said they would vote for congressional Democrats this fall — one of a few groups, including younger voters, who appeared to separate their frustration with the White House from their voting plans.
The dividing line was college. Democrats had a 13-point advantage over those with a bachelor’s degree. Among those without one, Republicans held a 15-point edge.
In taking over the House in 2018 and winning the Senate and White House in 2020, the winning Democratic coalition during the Trump presidency relied on a significant gender gap and on winning women by a wide margin.
But the poll showed that Republicans had entirely erased what had been an 11-point edge for Democrats among women last month in 2022 congressional races to a statistical tie in October.
Donald J. Trump’s favorability rating was tested by the survey. He had a better unfavorability rating than Mr. Biden.
In a poll of people, Mr. Trump had a one percentage point lead over Mr. Biden. Among women, Mr. Biden was ahead of Mr. Trump by only four points, compared with the margin of more than 10 points that Mr. Biden had in the 2020 election, according to studies of the national electorate for that election.
The nation is not feeling good today. A strong majority of likely voters, 64 percent, sees the country as moving in the wrong direction, compared with just 24 percent who see the nation as on the right track. Even the share of Democratic likely voters who believe the nation is headed in the right direction fell by six percentage points since September, though it is above the low point of the summer.
David and his friends are all hurt right now, so he is a Republican. “Inflation, interest rates, the cost of gas, the cost of food, the cost of my property taxes, my utilities — I mean, everything’s gone up astronomically, and it’s going to collapse.”
Inflation Revisited: The Real Problem of Electoral Elections in the Twenty-Year Post-Horizon Era
The Times/Siena survey of 792 likely voters nationwide was conducted by telephone using live operators from Oct. 9 to 12, 2022. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. Methodologies and cross-tabs are available here.
In Senate races, the unmistakable long-term trend is for attitudes about the sitting president to exert increasing influence over the results, often overshadowing views of the competing candidates. Senate and House races have become more like parliamentary contests in that more voters are choosing the one party they want to control Congress, rather than considering any individual merits of the two candidates.
Paul Maslin, a long-time Democratic pollster says that the real question comes down to that group of independents in the middle. “Is it people saying, ‘I hate inflation, crime is wrecking this big city I live in,’ or people saying, ‘I’m sorry but Herschel Walker is a clown, Mehmet Oz is a clown. They go back to the Democrats because of the joke that Blake Masters is. I don’t know. I don’t know.
The Democratic hopes that Biden’s approval rating would rise and lift their candidates were dashed because of the high inflation in 40 years.
A political scientist at Atlanta University says the biggest problem for Democrats is that things haven’t gotten better in people’s eyes because they don’t really know what the future holds. “If inflation had come down from where it has been, they would be in better shape. But you can’t convince people that things are going better when their own experience tells them that it’s not.”
There is a growing nationalization of these congressional races where opinions about national issues are more closely linked to how people vote in these House and Senate elections. It used to be easier for incumbents to run far ahead of a president from their party’s approval rating based on their reputation in their state or district, name recognition, and other things. Over time that value has gone down.
But four other Democrats in 2018 defied that trend to win in states where Trump’s approval stood at 50% or more. Those four Democratic victors included incumbents Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio as well as challenger Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona.
J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, the leading Democratic super PAC, argues that personal contrasts largely explain that unusually high Democratic support among voters dissatisfied with Biden. There is an agreement between Poersch and McConnell on the fact that candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome in Senate races. “Our Democratic candidates have strong track records of delivering for their states and a demonstrated ability to create their own environment, while Republicans are offering up a roster of extremists who are totally out of step.”
The CNN mid-October polls showed that they were still neck and neck even though they were attracting double-digit support from voters who disapprove of Biden. Gene Ulm is a Republican pollster and he thinks the electorate will favour GOP voters who are unhappy with Biden. The reason, he argues, is that in the end, disenchantment with current conditions and Biden’s performance will turbocharge more turnout from Republicans, and depress turnout more from Democrats, than most models now anticipate. “The composition of the electorate … is going to crush everything,” he says flatly.
Such exceptions have become rare in modern US politics. Because Biden’s standing is so weak in so many places, to hold the Senate, Democrats will almost certainly need a lot more of them.