Biden at 47%
This essay was published on Wed, Aug 25th, the day before the ISIS terror attack in Kabul which killed and wounded hundreds of people, including several dozen Americans.
Biden at 47% - So the big political news this week is Joe Biden’s plummeting poll numbers. On 538 this morning he’s at 47.2% approve, 47.6% (-.4) disapprove. On July 25th he was 51.8%-43.5% (+8.3). So he’s dropped almost 9 points in the past month. Most of this drop happened before Kabul fell, but it’s clear the unexpected victory of the Taliban has also driven the President’s numbers down a bit more (in the NBC/WSJ poll the President’s approval on Afghanistan is 25-60, in Suffolk it’s 26-62). While there is a chance Afghanistan could be a drag on the President’s standing for some time, it is more likely given the impressive progress made in recent days to be a secondary concern for most voters in the coming year.
So, what should the President do to get his approval back up? At NDN we think the President has to do two things. First, he needs to return to war footing on COVID, and put as much energy into defeating it here and around the world as he is getting people out of Kabul right now. As we review in a new memo, the primary reason the President was elected was to defeat COVID, and that work isn’t finished. We’ve been advocating that the President have a prime time “fire side” chat with the American people where he lays out a new and more muscular COVID plan, reviews the real progress that’s been made, and praise American ingenuity for putting us in a strong position to bring an end to this era of COVID here and everywhere in the coming months. Doing such a speech now and making COVID once again job #1 for his Presidency over the next few months will be particularly important as very soon every school and college/university will be open, and COVID will remain front and center in every community in the country for some time. The President has to more aggressively speak to the concerns of every day Americans about COVID, take the side of the 73% who’ve been vaccinated and regain his advantage – something the extremism of the GOP on COVID has made far easier in recent weeks.
In another memo we lay out the second thing the President needs to do - make very clear to us what America will get from withdrawing from Afghanistan and turning our resources and attention to more pressing challenges. Make this pivot real, concrete to people. Explain that our new strategy is to allow us to defeat COVID, tackle climate change, better compete with Russia and China, and defend democracy here and everywhere. That it is about going forward, not retreating; and that he will in the coming months be fighting here at home for an agenda that speaks directly to these new challenges/opportunities by defeating COVID, tackling climate change, helping our companies, communities and people compete and win in a more challenging global economy and modernizing our immigration system. No more talk of $3.5t, transformation, reconciliation – we have to talk strategy, outcomes now, not tactics. We have to spell out the 3-4 big things we are going to get from the President’s new agenda and just hammer them home, and while doing so make it as clear as day that everyone benefits from this agenda, all of us, the United States. Not certain groups – but all of us. There is no more powerful repudiation of Trumpism than relentlessly reminding Americans that we are all in this together, we are one people, one nation, and we rise and fall together.
What are we going to do this fall? Defeat COVID, tackle climate change, create more opportunity and prosperity for all Americans, and reform our immigration system. If we do those four things we will have successfully ushered in a better future for all of us, the President’s job approval will almost certainly rise again, and much more will be possible for the Democrats, the developed world’s most successful center-left political party.
