President Biden’s administration is still struggling to present the situation at the Southern border as anything but a full-blown crisis, new polling shows what direction the political winds are blowing ahead of the 2022 midterms, and changes to election law are drawing predictable partisan responses. Newell invited Lunchtime Politics publisher Ron Faucheaux onto the program Monday morning to discuss these topics and more.
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“There's been so much happening, I don't even know where to start with you,” Newell joked. “Let’s begin with Biden's job approval, which seems to be holding pretty steady.”
“Yeah, it's been holding steady,” Faucheaux said. “One thing I always like to do is compare a President's job approval to the percentage of the popular vote he received in the election. In Donald Trump's case, he received 46% of the vote when he was elected, and his job approval rating generally was a little lower than that, usually somewhere between 42 and 46%. But in the case of Biden at this point, and it's still early in his term, but his job approval has sort of been averaging about 55%. And he received about 51% of the popular vote. So he's doing a little better than his election performance. Significantly, whereas President Trump’s negative rating was almost constantly above 50%, Biden's negative rating is about 40% or in the low forties. Generally speaking, Biden is doing pretty well.”
“I can't help but wonder though, is it issue oriented, or is it that he's not very accessible to the media and thereby the public doesn't really get a chance to see him much? Almost everything that he says is scripted,” Newell said.
“It's a few things. Number one, 53% of voters in the United States voted against Donald Trump twice,” Faucheaux said. “And those people are so happy to have somebody new. I think they're going to give him a chance and support him as long as they can. Number two, the polls also show that the American voter strongly approves of President Biden's handling of the pandemic, and his approval ratings on that issue show solid majorities in approval, including a fairly significant number of Republicans. So when you consider that 53% of the country consistently voted against Trump and have approved of Biden on the coronavirus in numbers as high as the sixties, then it's understandable why his numbers are good.”
“But there are a lot of other things that are percolating right now,” Faucheaux continued. “The talk of a tax increase, the amount of spending that the Biden administration and Congress have been proposing, the spending on a variety of social welfare programs aren't as popular as things like infrastructure or coronavirus relief. The big issue that I think is potentially going to hurt the Democrats is the border crisis. Voters right now are almost two to one in saying that they disapprove of what the Biden administration is doing on immigration and the border. They need to bring that situation under control. That's easier said than done, but, but I think the border crisis is this administration's Achilles heel, and they need to be very careful about what they do. They need to move very quickly on it and take some decisive action.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.