The Atlantic: Why Biden Is Really Slipping in the Polls

There is a lot of shrieking going on in the media about Afghanistan. Even the worst polls for Joe Biden still show that the public supports his decision to withdraw and end the war. Most people don’t care about Afghanistan. They also still don’t believe that the war was worth fighting. Sure, it was ugly getting out because the Pentagon and the “intelligence community” was so wrong about the willingness of the Afghan army to fight and hold off the Taliban, but that isn’t what voters care about.

COVID is the true reason that Joe Biden is plunging in the polls. July the 4th had been sold as “Independence Day” from COVID. “Hot Vax Summer” and “shots in arms” was supposed to be the end of the pandemic and mark the return to normalcy. Then the Delta variant happened and the CDC reversed course and it has been back to wearing masks again even for people who supported Joe Biden and who trusted Fauci and who have been vaccinated. Some large number of them are understandably angry with Joe Biden that it seems like there is never to going to be an end to this.

The Atlantic:

“Losing a war undermines the public’s trust in any leader. But the setback causing the most damage to Joe Biden’s political standing likely isn’t the U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan—it’s the frustrating home-front struggle against the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.

Support for Biden’s performance as president has tumbled in the most recent batch of polling. For the first time since he took office, a higher percentage of people disapprove of the job he’s doing than approve, according to the RealClearPolitics average. (Biden remains just a hair above water in the FiveThirtyEight trend line.) On Tuesday, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll found his approval rating at 41 percent—a dismal showing more commonly associated with Biden’s unpopular predecessor, Donald Trump, who never won the support of a majority of voters.

The easy explanation for these numbers is that the public is blaming Biden for the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Voters seem to be siding with critics who say the president botched the withdrawal of U.S. forces and endangered both American citizens and Afghan allies who now are desperate to escape Kabul. Surely, the chaos overseas has played a part in Biden’s diminished standing. How could it not? Scenes of heartbreak and despair have dominated headlines and newscasts for the past 10 days, accompanied by grim comparisons to Vietnam and reminders that Biden had flatly ruled out such a nightmare scenario barely a month earlier. Just one-quarter of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of Afghanistan in an NBC News poll released on Sunday.

One data point has jumped out to pollsters more than any other. From April to August, the percentage of people in the NBC poll who said the worst of the pandemic was behind us plummeted by 24 points (from 61 percent to 37 percent). “These days, we just don’t see shifts like that in a lot of political measurements,” Jeff Horwitt, the Democratic half of the bipartisan polling team that ran the survey, told me. Leger measured a similar sentiment and saw an even more dramatic dip, from 60 percent in early July to just 32 percent about five weeks later. …”