Pirate's Cove

Even the lefty Daily Beast cannot figure out how to spin this

Biden and Democrats Should Be Absolutely Terrified by New Poll Numbers

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Gradually, then suddenly” is the reply.

This formulation might also help explain how it feels to lose an election. President Joe Biden’s collapse of popular support has been so long coming that a new Quinnipiac poll showing him with just a 33 percent approval rating (!) was greeted mostly with yawns.

Or, laughter

Dig a little deeper, though, and things are even scarier for Democrats.

Biden is polling at a dismal 24 percent approval among Hispanics (with 54 percent disapproving). And while his numbers among African-Americans are still above water at 63 percent, his numbers have fallen almost 20 percentage points since last April.

This poll may constitute a new low, but it’s no flukey outlier. The trends are clear. NBC News recently compared polling from 2018 (a great midterm year for Dems) with its own 2022 polling—and college-educated women are the only cohort that has become bluer. (Conversely, NBC News found a “pronounced [Republican] shift among men of 20 points,” as Steve Kornacki noted.)

It takes hard work to get to that number, like ruining a credit score

The main explanation, though, is probably a simple one: Hispanics and African-Americans—like a lot of us—are worried about inflation.

As Democratic pollster Jay Campbell told CNBC, “Cost of living has just blown everything else, including COVID, out of the water. And part of the reason for that is, there are attitudes about the economy that are largely a partisan phenomenon,” Campbell said. “That is not the case with inflation, or at least not right now. It is the top issue for Democrats, independents, and Republicans.”

This makes even more sense when you consider that inflation hurts low-wage Americans worse than anyone, and a disproportionate percentage of minorities belong to that economic cohort. As a result, some formerly reliable Democratic voters may be prioritizing their “working class” status over their racial identity.

At the end of every single poll, regarding the middle and lower classes, it comes down to the pocketbook. The kitchen table budget. The cost of putting food on the table. And all the basics of life. Biden is not only ignoring these, his policies are making them worse.