Biden's Poll Numbers are Bad...They Aren't Permanent

President Joe Biden (D-DE)

Political analysis is, on its best day, a reasonable answer to an unknowable guess.  Politics is not a science in the same sense that most sciences can be replicated.  If you drop a snowball onto the ground, it will fall-gravity doesn't disappoint.  If you add baking soda to water, it will pretty quickly have alkaline properties. But political science...it's largely trying to predict based on past trends that too often people take as gospel.

I was reminded of this yesterday when many political minds looked at the poll numbers that Joe Biden had in the ABC News poll and pronounced imminent doom for the Democratic Party.  I had to mute a few people because they were being so ridiculous, but quick assertions that the Democrats may not have another trifecta for a generation and that all four of the vulnerable Democratic senators (Cortez Masto, Kelly, Warnock, & Hassan) were about to become unemployed in November are premature at best.

It's worth noting that the ABC News poll was about as bad of a political conversation that Biden could've gotten from the news outlet.  A 37% approval rating in a midterm election is a death knell for an incumbent, particularly in a year where most of his best chances at making gains in the long-term battle for the Senate (remember, winning the Senate is like a game of chess-you can't just do it in one cycle, it usually takes three) are on the table (Democrats have not had a roster of potential pickups this rosy since 2008).  Biden's economic numbers are terrible (a 20-point margin to trust the Republicans on the economy is rough and proof that the administration has not found a way to handle the rising cost of inflation, particularly at a time when many Americans are realizing that their annual pay increases will not make up for inflation, so in many minds people are getting "pay cuts" under Biden).  This is a bad poll, and if the election were held under it, the Democrats would be in for a disaster.

But...the election isn't for another nine months, and the poll was made on the cusp of the finest hour of Biden's presidency to date.  The poll was conducted immediately before Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which so far Joe Biden has handled about as well as a politician could expect to handle an impossible situation.  Even conservative figures like Condi Rice are going on Fox News and praising the president, saying that he united NATO in a way that she couldn't have possibly imagined in a post-Cold War era.  Combine that with the lifting mask mandates, and the increasingly optimistic numbers on Covid/Omicron, and you have a completely different (potential) chapter for the president.

I think that political pundits have confused an increasingly immobile partisan metric in both DC and across the country with the idea that small shifts can't happen with numbers, but to assume that Biden's performance the past week won't impact his standings is, well, stupid.  Rally-the-flag is still a thing to some degree, and I think most assume that just because it isn't what it was in 2001 (even a 9/11-style event wouldn't get Biden the kinds of numbers that George W. Bush received after the attacks on the World Trade Center), that there won't be something for Biden.  If anything, he'll get better marks on national security in the next poll and likely will have independents/Democrats coming back to the fold.  Additionally, the Omicron numbers will at the very least help parts of the economy (specifically travel/tourism) continue their recovery.  While inflation will still be the signature concern for Biden in the coming months, particularly as oil/gas prices are going to climb with a trade embargo with Russia, Biden has some options on that front (I suspect if Schumer/Pelosi know what's good for them we're about to see a gas tax suspension that'll be difficult for even Republicans not to back), and he's also got a literal world war now to point to as an excuse as to why Americans need to sacrifice some cash at the pumps.

On top of this, Biden has a counterpoint that has made Republicans deeply uncomfortable, and can potentially risk independents if Democrats market it properly (and I suspect the omnipresence of Ukraine in the media will do that): Donald Trump & his weird obsession with Vladimir Putin.  Putin has now graduated from being an evil, unknowable man with little impact on Americans day-to-day lives to a figure that threatens the safety-and-security of the world.  He's no longer an anonymous despot in the minds of much of the world-he's now entered Adolf Hitler & Saddam Hussein territory, killing innocent people while trying to destabilize the planet.  While Fox News and figures like Tucker Carlson defend him, the longer they do the more they're going to look like Benedict Arnold to average Americans.  You can already see the fractures happening here-Mitt Romney is basically calling figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene "traitors" while Trump, the leader of the party, is making it impossible for Republicans to side with Biden on this one issue.  As a result, you have patriotic Americans being forced to deal in-real-time with a former president praising a guy who is acting like the villain in a Bond movie.  This friction won't sustain, and Biden's going to end up with the majority of Americans on his side here...that might not move votes, but it's not going to hurt Democrats that most Americans stay with Biden than with the Republicans on a vital foreign policy issue.

It is possible that the situation in Ukraine does not ultimately change enough minds to save the Democrats in November.  At this juncture, only a fool would predict the Democrats have enough of a reversal that they can save the House, or increasingly, the Senate.  But an even greater fool would look at the state-of-the-world in the past 96 hours and not assume that this won't have an effect on voters & Biden's approval ratings, and with that, there's a potential for recovery in poll numbers.  It feels gauche at a time like this to discuss electoral politics & Democrats' chances, but so many people did this yesterday with such glib certainty that I felt I needed to put a rebuttal into the world.  The ABC News poll of Bidens/Democrats' chances was not good news, in fact it was dreadful news...but it's news that could change.  At this point in February 2020, it wasn't yet clear that Donald Trump would royally screw up the Covid response that we still didn't quite have a handle on...to assume that a literal world war won't have an impact on the November elections is absolutely bonkers to me.  Polls right now mean nothing so far away from an election, when too much of the rest of the math is uncertain.