Having put up a post the other day on yet more examples of “President” Biden’s rotting old brain there comes further news that this is having an impact on his polling.
Gallup’s job approval rating survey looked at the 13th quarter recorded for each president since 1956, which begins on January 20 and ends on April 19. Biden’s job approval rating in his 13th quarter of presidency is considered a historic low at 38.7 percent. It surpasses George H.W. Bush’s previous lowest record of a 41.8 percent average job approval rating.
| Ranking | President | 13th Quarter | Avg Job Approval (%) | Reelected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eisenhower | 1956 | 73.2 | Yes |
| 2 | Reagan | 1984 | 54.5 | Yes |
| 3 | Nixon | 1972 | 53.7 | Yes |
| 4 | Clinton | 1996 | 53.0 | Yes |
| 5 | G.W. Bush | 2004 | 51.0 | Yes |
| 6 | Carter | 1980 | 47.7 | No |
| 7 | Trump | 2020 | 46.8 | No |
| 8 | Obama | 2012 | 45.9 | Yes |
| 9 | G.H.W. Bush | 1992 | 41.8 | No |
| 10 | Biden | 2024 | 38.7 | TBD |
Trump is not exactly Mr Popular himself, but as the recent Bloomberg poll shows Trump has returned to a statistically significant national lead on that measure, 49% – 43% (CNN shows the same), with Biden’s popularity undoubtedly taking a hit from his historically low job approval rating.
However, as I have said many times over the years when looking at US Presidential elections, national polls are irrelevant. Even when a candidate has a blow-out win, like Reagan in 1980 and 1984, the national polls never showed such strength.
What counts are the polls in the swing states, the handful that will decide the election, and the news there is good for Trump. Just as important in polling are the trends, and those too have almost all been positive for Trump for months now.
Finally one caveat on the national polls; while they should be largely ignored for predictive power it should be noted that all such polls, Rasmussen, Gallup, Bloomberg, etc, showed Trump trailing both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 for months leading up to the election.
Now, they’ve been showing him tied, just behind and then ahead of Biden for months now.
Still, I’m convinced that since this is a fight between two historically unpopular candidates, the final result will turn on the effectiveness of the GOP and Democrat Party machines to get the votes, and on that front the Democrats have been superior to the GOP for more than a decade now.
No Minister 
Who can spend the “Get out the Vote Money” better as Mr Wolfe observed in his book A Man in Full, is a proxy for buying votes through ground level activists.
Will be interesting if Trumps appeal with minorities like Hispanics grows… Would be a solid counter to the Dems vote harvesting tactics
At some point I’m going to write a post on the election machinery of both parties but suffice to that while money is a big factor – and the Democrats have spent more than the GP in countless races large and small since 2007 – it’s also about how you use that money on lawyers, legal targets, software, etc.
On almost every one of those fronts the Democrats beat the GOP. It’s been a long, probably not since 2004, when the Democrats expressed any envy of the GOP machine.
A couple of questions:
Is Trump being tied up with lawfare working for him the way hiding in his basement did for Biden?
I’m reading some strange stuff emanating form New York and California that suggest the brown vote (latinos etc.) may not come out for the Dems as usually happens. Will this affect the three elections adversely for the Dems?
1st sentence:
Yes. Trump is not in position to trip over his own dick as has often been the case, although that actually worked for him in 2016 when the MSM stupidly headlined the “gaffes” only to discover how much of American agreed with Trump on both substance and tone. In 2020 the DNC-MSM complex were ready for him and of course C-19 helped hurt him in multiple ways, starting with him always wanting to be the centre of attention.
2nd opinion
Yes. Already written about here and here. Put bluntly demography is not political destiny as the Dems have thought for twenty years now. I’ll follow-up at some point since the polls for each of those groups, plus youth, have not turned around for Biden since those posts earlier this year.
At the moment my money is on Biden. I don’t like Trump particularly as a person (not a republican/democrat thing – I despise the Clintons as much or even more), and I think when he puts Twitter down and shuts the hell up his actual policies as POTUS are better.
But the Dems will outspend him.
I think that is a shame for the world because at the moment Joe Biden is a disaster and a lot of the crap that is happening around the world is due to his weakness as an international leader.
I know Trump is portrayed as an isolationist and a buddy of Putin, Kim Jong Un etc in the media but a lot of what he has said has also been taken massively out of context.
341 million people in the USA and it comes down to these two.