Business Insider
Historically, a newly elected president’s party consistently loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections two years after the general. The average loss in the House – where every seat is up for reelection every two years – has been 25 seats since 1946, or an average of 37 for unpopular presidents, according to Gallup .
Even the generic ballot, which has proven to be the most reliable predictor of a party’s performance in the midterm elections, doesn’t tend to resemble the eventual results until a few months out from the election, as Nathaniel Rakich wrote last week in a FiveThirtyEight polling analysis .
Presidential approval has not had the same predictive weight to it when it comes to the midterms compared to a full presidential election, though there remains a loose correlation between the two.
In continuing surveys like Gallup and NPR/Marist, Biden’s approval has not budged that much with Democrats and Republicans. His biggest issue has been hemorrhaging support among independents for months.
Pollsters that ask about his handling of the pandemic have found a slide in that metric among independents, which tends to mirror his overall job approval rating with the same group.
In January, 61% of independent voters told Gallup they approved of Biden’s job performance. The latest poll has him all the way down to 37% among them.
With the Afghanistan withdrawal on top of that, Biden’s approval has reverted to Obama and Trump-era levels of polarization.
