Joe Biden’s Rebound Is Real

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

 

The latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll confirms that Democratic voters are no longer raging against their political reality.

 

That poll, which had found Joe Biden trudging along with an anemic job-approval rating of just 36 percent among U.S. adults in July, showed Biden surging to 46 percent approval today. The president enjoys even higher marks among registered voters: 49 percent, a near majority. But with independent voters still unenthusiastic about the president’s conduct in office, much of Biden’s rebound is owed to a change of heart among Democratic partisans.

 

In the months since the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats seem to have made peace with Joe Biden’s presidency. On the eve of the midterm vote, Marist polling found 54 percent of Democrats and Democrat-voting independents believed that jettisoning Biden from the presidential ticket would improve the party’s electoral prospects. Today, most Democrats believe that Biden represents their party’s best chance to retain the White House. Only 45 percent disagree.

 

That’s a sizable shift in opinion, and it doesn’t entirely comport with other recent surveys of Democratic voters. In February, for example, an Associated Press-NORC Center poll found that only 37 percent of self-identified Democrats wanted Biden to seek a second term in the White House. A majority preferred someone else. But who? Subsequent AP-NORC polling demonstrates that there is no consensus around and little enthusiasm for a potential Democratic successor to Biden. Both the AP and Marist polls suggested that Biden-skeptical Democratic voters are coming around to the president — either affirmatively or by default.

 

NPR attributes the shift in Democratic opinion to the party’s unexpectedly strong performance in the midterms, Biden’s State of the Union address, and a general sense of resignation on the left. Even if the circumstances leading Democrats to coalesce around Biden are debatable, the evidence of their renewed enthusiasm is real. Moreover, this phenomenon is contributing tangibly to Democrats’ improved political prospects.

 

In Tuesday night’s special election to replace the late representative A. Donald McEachin in Virginia’s dark-blue fourth congressional district, Democratic voters turned out in droves. Representative-elect Jennifer McClellan defeated her Republican opponent by margins that eclipse the party’s performance in either 2020 or 2022. “A big overperformance,” according to New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn, who added that Democrats hadn’t enjoyed this level of enthusiasm in a majority-minority district like this in some time.

 

The caricature of Joe Biden — one into which he often plays — is that of a buffoonish, overly familiar glad-hander whose obvious decrepitude precludes him from holding high office. All that could be true and even self-evident, but an incumbent president with the support of more than 90 percent of his party is a hard target. And party unity counts for a lot. As Cohn demonstrated, Republicans were not similarly united in support of their party’s candidates in 2022, and it cost them a great deal. In battleground states across the country, “Republican-leaning voters decided to cast ballots for Democrats,” he wrote, “even as they voted for Republican candidates for U.S. House or other down-ballot races in their states.”

 

Persuadable Republican voters cannot be cajoled or blackmailed into setting aside their reservations about the party and its mission. They’ll have to be convinced.