Joe Biden Promises to Leave Politics Forever, Becomes More Popular

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

 

Joe Biden is enjoying a renaissance — at least according to Joe Biden’s remaining loyalists.

 

The Huffington Post’s Kevin Robillard noted, at the risk of overstatement, that the president’s historically low job-approval ratings have improved since Biden announced on July 21 that he would not seek a second term after all. “Biden remains far from the nation’s most adored politician,” Robillard conceded. Still, the president has seen some polling data that suggests the public’s overall satisfaction with Biden’s performance in office has improved:

 

In the Suffolk poll, his disapproval rating is effectively tied with his approval rating at 49%. . . . Beyond Suffolk, polling from Quinnipiac University and Gallup has also found big increases in Biden’s standing. In Quinnipiac’s polls, he went from a net −18 approval in mid-July to −7 in a survey conducted last week. Gallup had him jumping from −22 net approval in July to −10 in August.

 

Of course, Biden’s improvement is relative to his own dismal performance in the months leading up to his exit from the presidential race. His job-approval rating was underwater to the tune of roughly 17 points in July. Today, he’s only underwater by about twelve points. Biden’s average favorability rating was in the red by 17 points in July. Today, he’s cut that down to just 14.5 points.

 

For what remains of team Biden, this revision, small though it may be, is the best news they’ve had in months. But what is driving this modest reassessment of the president’s handling of his office? According to the White House, Biden’s gains are attributable to “positive economic news over recent weeks,” including “low gas prices in the run-up to the Labor Day holiday; consumer confidence hitting a six-month high; and what the Wall Street Journal called ‘giddiness’ about the stock market.”

 

Perhaps. If we’re parsing polling data, however, voters still express broad dissatisfaction with the economy and pine for a restoration of the status quo ante over which Donald Trump presided. More likely, Biden owes his marginally rejuvenated brand to his decision to retreat permanently from American public life. The onset of his ex-presidential glow may have come earlier than for his predecessors, but former presidents tend to enjoy a favorable reappraisal from voters when they no longer have the power to intrude on those voters’ lives. Understandably, Biden’s handlers don’t want to emphasize the fact that the primary factor boosting their boss’s image is his decision to all but disappear from the political stage.

 

And yet, even if Biden doesn’t seem like an active participant in his own presidency anymore, he is not wholly absent from the political scene. On Monday, the president appeared at a Kamala Harris campaign event in Pittsburgh, where he burnished his chosen successor’s blue-collar bona fides. The Harris campaign’s decision to deploy a still-unpopular president whom swing-state voters blame for their economic doldrums reveals less about Biden’s strengths than about Harris’s weaknesses, particularly among white, working-class men.

 

Perhaps Harris is banking on the potential to bask in some of the adoration a grateful nation has bestowed on Biden for his generous decision to leave them alone. That’s a reasonable gamble. The notion that they would be equally grateful to Harris for promising to pick up where Biden leaves off is far more debatable.