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BIDEN APPROVAL: BETTER BUT STILL BAD. President Joe Biden's job approval rating hit its low point, 36.8%, in the RealClearPolitics average of polls on July 21. At the same time, his disapproval rating was 57.5%. Both were unhappy records for Biden, and also for any president at that point in his term. That's how low Biden sank. Today, Biden's job approval rating is 42.2%, up 5.4 points from his low. His disapproval rating is 54.8%, down 2.7 percentage points from its high. The improvement in Biden's approval is pretty significant — 5.4 points is not nothing. The problem is that even with that improvement, Biden is still around 42% approval. Around this time in 2018, as former President Donald Trump approached his first (and only) midterm elections, the Gallup polling organization published an article headlined, "Midterm Seat Loss Averages 37 for Unpopular Presidents." "The president's party almost always suffers a net loss of U.S. House seats in midterm elections," Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones wrote. "However, losses tend to be much steeper when the president is unpopular. In Gallup's polling history, presidents with job approval ratings below 50 percent have seen their party lose 37 House seats, on average, in midterm elections. That compares with an average loss of 14 seats when presidents had approval ratings above 50 percent." Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what's going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue! Gallup's analysis was spot on for Trump's midterm elections. The president's job approval rating was 41% on Election Day, and his Republican Party lost 43 House seats. So now, the most inconvenient fact for Democrats is this: Biden's job approval rating, 42.2%, is well below 50%. The second most inconvenient fact is that Democrats do not need to lose 20, 30, 40 seats to lose control of the House. If they lose just seven seats, Democratic control is over. Anything above that just determines whether the Republican majority is narrow or broad. Gallup's below 50% rule is ironclad, going back half a century. In that time, no president with a job approval rating below 50% has gained seats in the House. Republicans, Democrats — if they were below 50%, they lost seats. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump — all were below 50% at midterm election time, and all lost a lot. The big question now is whether there is something new about conditions in 2022, whether today's politics are so different from the past that the lessons of history do not apply. You will not be shocked to learn that some Democrats are trying to talk themselves into believing just that. Longtime party strategist Simon Rosenberg, for many years head of the New Democrat Network, is perhaps the most optimistic Democrat in Washington these days. And he is not a recent convert to optimism. He has been saying for a long time that 2022 will not fit into the historical midterm pattern. Nearly a year ago, on Nov. 1, 2021, Rosenberg posted an analysis titled: "Three Reasons Why 2022 Won't Be 2010." The three reasons were 1) Democrats had made good on their agenda promises, such as infrastructure spending, 2) "The GOP's extremism will be easy for Dems to exploit," and 3) there were indications that Democratic turnout in the midterm elections would be high. The analysis was not exactly right — the word "inflation" appears nowhere in it — but the part about Republican "extremism" has been a guidepost for Democrats. "Many of us believed that if Trump was defeated in 2020 his brand of extremist politics would fade from the national scene," Rosenberg wrote. "But over the past year we've seen this extremism spread far beyond Trump." That, he argued, has created a "fear of MAGA" that Democrats can "exploit" to win in 2022. Note that Republican candidates don't actually have to be extremists. The point is that Democrats will portray them as extremists. And now, it is clear to all that Biden is working 24/7 to exploit the "fear of MAGA." If the president's last couple of weeks on the campaign trail have had any theme, that would be it. Will it work? Certainly, at one point, a lot of Democrats hoped to make the 2022 midterm elections about Trump. Over the summer, as inflation roared and voter pessimism increased, that became a more difficult job for Democratic candidates. But then came Aug. 8 and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump's winter home in Florida. The ensuing controversy, growing out of a Justice Department criminal investigation of Trump focused on allegations of improper handling of documents, has pushed Trump's already-high negatives among Democrats and independent voters even higher. And it has inspired the president and his party to a new effort to exploit the "fear of MAGA." There is simply no doubt that Biden has benefited politically from his Justice Department's pursuit of Trump. Is that enough to upend a very solid historical trend? It seems unlikely. The problem for Democrats is that there are issues other than Trump. On the pro-Democratic side, some voters are energized in opposition to the Supreme Court's abortion decision. But on the Republican side, inflation is still an enormous burden on consumers and promises to remain so through Election Day. Yes, the price of gas has fallen in recent weeks, but any person who has gone to the grocery store knows that the White House spin about "zero" inflation is just spin. That is one component of the enormous sense of pessimism that many voters feel about the country's future. The fact is, voters, even those who appear to have become a little more forgiving toward Biden, are still in the mood for a change. "Biden's improving job approval numbers come despite the fact that more voters today say things are 'on the wrong track' than they did in March, despite the fact that more voters today say they have a negative view of the economy than they did in March," noted political analyst Kristen Soltis Anderson. Can Democrats convince voters that they should be more worried about MAGA than about their own livelihoods? Anything is possible, but the midterm outlook still looks solid for a Republican takeover of the House. For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
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