Hot-air
Reuters? Up until a month ago, the Reuters tracking poll existed on the other end of the outlier spectrum. At that point, Joe Biden’s approval gap in the Reuters survey was still the negative single digits while almost every other pollster had Biden deep into double digits.
Not any longer. Yesterday’s iteration puts Biden at 36/58, both new records for Biden in the polling series, and the gap of -22 at near the largest tracked by RealClearPolitics. They offer a succinct review of the results:
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating fell for a fourth straight week to 36% matching its lowest level last seen in late May, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll completed on Wednesday. The president’s approval rating has stayed below 50% since August, a warning sign that his Democratic Party could lose control of at least one chamber of the U.S. Congress in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Thirty-four percent of Americans say the economy is the most important issue currently facing the United States. Biden has been plagued by 40-year-highs in inflation, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine restricting global fuel supply and supply chains still constrained by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his own party, Biden’s approval rating remains largely unchanged since last week – at 73% compared to 74% on June 15. In August, 85% of Democrats approved of Biden’s performance. But among Republicans, Biden’s rating slipped to 7% compared to 11% on June 15. Only 18% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.
Biden did hit 36/59 in a late-May iteration of the survey, but then bounced up the next week to 42/52. It seemed at the time that Reuters had an outlier response, but instead it appears to have only foreshadowed the trendline. Since that snapback, Biden has lost twelve points in the gap over the last three weeks:
The demos here look bad as well. Reuters doesn’t break out ethnic demos except to denote white and “non-white” voters, but he’s now falling underwater among the latter, 43/49. Biden now trails among urban voters, his party’s power core, 45/46, while he’s getting crushed in the suburbs 37/60. The gender-gap on which Democrats rely has almost entirely disappeared, with Biden’s job approval among men (39/59) about the same as it is among women (34/57), even after nearly two months of stoking the flames of Roe over the Supreme Court leak in early May.
Perhaps worse than the approval ratings, however, are the results in this poll on the issues that voters will prioritize in November. What among these will Democrat…
