Joe Biden’s decreasing approval rating since the summer is reflecting the Democrats’ overall rating as we slowly approach the next year’s midterms. Both Biden and Harris have been struggling with their ratings in the last couple of months following an unfortunate series of events starting with the handling of the pandemic and the Afghanistan events.
Although we are just less than a year until the midterms, Democrats seem pretty concerned how the White House policies and the overall team Biden rating will reflect the party and the results in the congress. And according to a recent poll, they should be worried a lot.
The poll by John Zogby Strategies, released last week, found that 45 percent of independents want the GOP in charge of the House and Senate, compared to 27 percent who want Democrats to keep their majority. The remaining 28 percent said they were undecided.
The same survey found that Republicans held a three-point advantage, 46 percent to 43 percent, on the generic congressional ballot.
“In my four decades of polling, Democrats need about a five percentage-point advantage [in] nationwide congressional preference in order to maintain a majority of Congress,” pollster John Zogby said in a statement.
“With a three-point Republican lead, and a substantial lead among independents, signs are pointing today to the possibility of a big Republican advantage going into 2022.”
Several independent polls recently showed that Biden’s rating recently went below 40%, but John Zogby Strategies poll shows that Biden’s approval rating sits at 45% mid-December. Although Biden is not the only president at this time of the presidency with such low rating, the real concerns for Democrats is the fact that at lease 52% of the respondents are disapproving his work so far. While Biden’s approval number is higher than in some other recent polls, Zogby noted that 40 percent of respondents said they “strongly” disapproved of the president’s work.
“Biden’s overall numbers are borderline at 46 percent, but with 40 percent strong disapproval, his room for growth is severely limited,” he said.
According to the poll results, only 20% strongly approve Biden’s work so far. If we take into consideration how he handled the largest issues the country faced since he became president, it’s easy to understand why so many people disapprove his work so far.
The online survey of 777 registered voters was conducted Dec. 17 and carries a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.6 percentage points.
Many presidents were able to recover their rating after their first year in the White House office, but Democrats are afraid that might not be the case with Joe Biden mostly because of the Covid-19 pandemic which definitely directly affects every aspect of our lives despite the decent vaccination rate in United States.
This was once again confirmed recently with the Omicron variant. When Americans thought that we are finally getting closer to end the pandemic and majority of the people expected ‘calm’ winter in terms of new Covid-19 numbers, Omicron came and in a matter of days became the dominant strain in the world affecting fully vaccinated, boosted and those with natural immunity.
Republicans only need to win a net of five seats to regain control of the House of Representatives, and 23 House Democrats have already announced they are not seeking re-election next year. It will be interesting to see how Biden’s current approval will affect the midterms’ results next year.
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