As Townhall reported last week, President Joe Biden's approval hit a new low of just 33 percent — a five-point slide from the beginning of 2023 and 21 points lower than when he first took office.
Whether it's Biden's handling of the border crisis, economic policy, international crises, working with Congress, or uniting Americans, voters just aren't impressed with the way the president has carried on.
With the 2024 election now less than one year away, the downhill slide for Biden's approval numbers is not welcome news — and Biden is apparently growing "increasingly frustrated" with those around him for not doing enough to fix the unfixable.
According to the Washington Post:
After pardoning a pair of turkeys, an annual White House tradition, Biden delivered some stern words for the small group assembled: His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it. He complained that his economic message had done little to move the ball, even as the economy was growing and unemployment was falling, according to people familiar with his comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.
For months, the president and first lady Jill Biden have told aides and friends they are frustrated by the president’s low approval rating and the polls that show him trailing former president Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination — and in recent weeks, they have grown upset that they are not making more progress.
Biden's frustration with Americans' sour impression of his performance as president is unsurprising: the border is chaos, the enemies of freedom are emboldened and on the march around the world, and prices have risen more than 17 percent while real wages fell nearly four percent compared to when Biden took office.
The fact that Biden's campaign and White House teams have been unable to find a way to rebound their boss' approval is also unsurprising: their whole plan has been to try deceiving Americans into believing everything is fine, the economy is booming, prices are deflating, and that there's nothing wrong. If anything is wrong, it's certainly not Biden's fault, they've argued.
Well, Americans are smarter than Biden's messaging wizards because they're not buying Team Biden's urging to not believe their lying eyes.
When even Biden, who frequently seems uncertain or where he is or who's around him, knows that his polls are increasingly problematic, it's clear there's an issue. As WaPo noted, the "accumulation of troubling polls for Biden has made it harder for Democrats to dismiss them, leading to a fresh set of conversations among Biden officials and allies about whether the president and his team need a shift in strategy" — or perhaps a change in candidate?. "And now Democrats in competitive races are growing increasingly worried about Biden damaging their own electoral prospects," WaPo added.
Here's how the Post read the poll-writing on the wall:
Voters, including a majority of Democrats, are particularly concerned about Biden’s age and consistently rank it as a bigger problem for the president, 81, than Trump, 77.
In the states, recent polls from CNN found Biden trailed Trump in Michigan by 10 points and in Georgia by 5 points. In early November, New York Times-Siena College polls found Biden trailing Trump in five of the six most competitive battleground states: Trump led Biden by 10 percentage points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona and Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Biden led Trump by two in Wisconsin, albeit well within the 4.8-point margin of error. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in all six of those states, though by very narrow margins.
Biden surrogates have been insisting that "polls don't vote" in their attempts to squash coverage of Biden's ever-declining approval among Americans, but Biden's frustration makes it clear that there's anxiety within the White House and Biden re-election campaign over his standing with some eleven months to go.