President Joe Biden has been slipping in the polls since the rise of delta roughly a year ago, and he just hit another new low.
Among registered voters, Biden is polling at 39 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval, according to a bombshell new poll from Morning Consult/Politico. He slipped below 40 percent approval for the first time in the history of that poll.
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By contrast, former President Donald Trump was sitting at 45 percent approval and 51 disapproval in the same poll from 2018 during the same point in his presidency, and the 2018 midterm elections still saw a historic blue wave.
In fact, Trump reached 58 disapproval only once in this poll. It was in June 2020, amid the early pandemic and the riots after George Floyd’s murder.
The pollsters spoke to 2,006 registered voters between June 4 and 5, and they estimated the margin of error at 2 percentage points.
The pollsters did not immediately specify how they contacted their respondents. Historically, other pollsters have used such varied methods as voicemail, phone call, and text message.
Despite Biden’s shocking unpopularity, the Democrats have found some silver linings in the polls.
For one thing, Biden can still win votes from disapproving voters. One Twitter user remarked, “Approval ratings don’t correlate with election results because approval polls are about the president versus the vibes while elections are about the president versus his opponent.”
In fact, the Democrats are still tying the Republicans on the generic ballot midterm. Each party was polling at 42 percent among registered voters.
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Plus, the poll found some voters who disapproved of Biden but still intended to vote for downballot Democrats in the midterms. In the same poll from 2018, disapproval of Trump correlated much more strongly with an intention to vote Democrat.
Sure enough, an April poll from Morning Consult/Politico found no apparent correlation between Biden’s approval ratings and the approval ratings of Senate Democrats. One particularly obscure senator — Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — has seen no net change to her approval rating since January 2021.
Still, the poll found the Democrats have been losing support on the generic ballot. September’s poll found the Democrats with a four-point advantage over the Republicans.
In other words, the Democrats haven’t lost everything yet.
But they’re still looking at a very bleak future.
The Horn editorial team