Joe Biden’s ‘unpopularity’ needs no explanation

Americans’ distaste for “Bidenomics” and Joe Biden’s unpopularity are realities easily understood and explained, but apparently mainstream media operative Rick Newman didn’t get the memo, and penned an essay trying to get to the bottom of it, as excerpted below:

Democrats have struggled to understand how job growth can be stellar and unemployment close to record lows, yet President Biden’s approval rating remains stuck in the low 40% range. An even smaller portion of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.

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Inflation is the culprit. Nominal wages have risen, but inflation has risen more. ‘The rate of inflation outstripped the rate of pay increases so that the income of most households did not buy as much,’ William Galston of the Brookings Institution wrote recently. ‘Americans noticed this decrease, and as the polls indicate, they did not like it.’

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For now, however, many voters sense that they were doing better when Donald Trump was president, even if they don’t like Trump. The data supports that, to some extent.

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Voters tend to credit or blame the president for whatever happens on his watch, but the economy is a gargantuan, complex machine that doesn’t respond much to presidential policies.

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So what about Biden? Voters clearly blame him for inflation that reached a peak of 9% in June of 2022. It’s now down to 3.7%, a considerable improvement. But Biden’s approval rating hasn’t improved as inflation has come down, which indicates voters are still feeling the pain of inflation and not yet in a mood to forgive the incumbent for lost purchasing power.

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