The results of the latest poll done by Ipsos for ABC News showed Joe Biden enjoying a “Ukraine bounce” in the polls, with 48 percent of the 622 adults polled approving of his performance. This is up seven percentage points from a dismal 41 percent in January.
With the exception of a bounce in how he’s handling the pandemic that’s all the good news Ipsos had to report. Everywhere else, from inflation to gas prices, from immigration to crime, Biden’s decline in the polls continues.
Biden’s attempt to blame the jump in gas prices on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin failed the smell test, as did White House Secretary Jan Psaki’s. On Friday Biden said, “Make no mistake. Inflation is largely the fault of Putin.” Earlier, Psaki tried to defect responsibility: “The reason why the price of gas is going up is not because of steps the president has taken. They are because President Putin is invading Ukraine, and that is creating a great deal of instability in the global marketplace.”
House Minority Leader Ken McCarthy scoffed at this: “These are not Putin gas prices. They are Biden gas prices.”
Indeed, gas prices were moving higher long before Putin initiated hostilities in Ukraine.
Other polls reflect the same dismal result for Biden: Polling done for the Wall Street Journal and released last Friday showed his approval at 42 percent, while results of a poll done by Schoen Cooperman Research that were released on Sunday showed Biden “9 points underwater, which marks a 4-point drop since our December poll,” according to the poll’s author Doug Schoen.
In an op-ed piece done for The Hill on Sunday, Schoen, a Democratic pollster, reported that “most voters (61 percent) agree that Biden and Democrats are out of touch with hardworking Americans” and “have been so focused on catering to the far-left wing of the party that they’re ignoring Americans’ day-to-day concerns” such as “rising prices” and “combatting violent crime.”
He added:
Biden’s net approval rating is 9 points underwater (54 percent disapprove, 45 percent approve), which marks a 4-point drop since our December poll (51 percent disapprove, 46 percent approve). A plurality of voters (43 percent) also say that Biden has done worse as president than they expected, rather than better (19 percent)….
Biden’s approval rating on handling the nation’s economic recovery is 21 points underwater (59 percent disapprove, 38 percent approve). This marks a notable 17-point decline from our December polling, when Biden’s approval rating on the recovery was negative 4 points, 50 percent to 46 percent.
In addition to harboring negative views about the economy generally, two-thirds of voters (68 percent) blame the Biden administration’s policies for inflation either fully or partially.
Schoen summed up the results of his company’s latest poll:
Collectively, our data paints a picture of a Democratic Party that is unable to connect with voters on basic “kitchen table” issues, namely the economy and crime….
Ultimately, if Democrats do not embrace a strategic shift to the political center, they risk historic defeats — worse than 1994 or 2010 — in this year’s midterm elections.
For the record, Democrats lost 60 seats in the House and Senate in 1994, and 69 total seats — House and Senate — in 2010. At the time, those losses were considered catastrophic for the Democratic Party.
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