ReportWire

Tag: approval ratings

  • Trump’s approval rating changes direction with urban voters

    [ad_1]

    President Donald Trump is starting 2026 with a shift in an unlikely corner of the electorate: Americans living in the nation’s largest cities.

    A new Fox News poll—conducted January 23-26 under the joint direction of Democratic pollster Beacon Research and Republican pollster Shaw & Company Research among 1,005 registered voters nationwide—found the president’s job approval rising modestly among urban residents, a group that has been one of his weakest since he returned to office.

    Newsweek contacted the White House for comment via email outside regular business hours. 

    Why It Matters 

    For a Republican president, movement inside the U.S.’s major cities is rare, and even small changes can have disproportionate political consequences. 

    Urban areas hold dense concentrations of voters, drive statewide outcomes and often shape national political sentiment long before it shows up in election results.

    What To Know

    Trump gained ground with urban voters in the late-January Fox News poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, as approval in cities rose to 40 percent from 34 percent in December, while disapproval fell to 60 percent from 66 percent, according to the Fox News survey’s cross-tabs and top lines.

    Fox News’ end-of-year poll of 1,001 registered voters, conducted December 12-15 by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company, also had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3  percentage points.

    Both polls selected respondents randomly from a national voter file. Interviews were completed through a mix of landlines, cellphones and online survey links texted to a subset of voters.

    Although it is hardly friendly territory for the Republican president, this latest shift in how urban voters approve of how he is doing his job represents a meaningful movement.

    A president who improves from 34 percent to about 40 percent in American cities does not suddenly become competitive in these largely Democratic strongholds, but he becomes harder to defeat statewide.

    Urban softening can also bleed into adjacent suburbs, where political margins are often decisive.

    This month-over-month shift among urban voters came as Trump’s overall approval held at 44 percent nationally in the same Fox News series, underscoring movement inside a key geographic subgroup even as the top line stayed flat.

    Urban voters are one of the core subgroups tracked by Fox News in its national polling, which reports results by area—urban, suburban and rural—when subgroup sample sizes reach at least 100 respondents. 

    Because these area categories are weighted alongside age, race, education and region to reflect the registered voter population, shifts within urban areas can influence the overall approval picture.

    In plain terms: Within a month, more city-dwelling registered voters told Fox News they approved of Trump’s job performance, and fewer said they disapproved. 

    Even with that improvement, however, most urban respondents still gave the president negative marks.

    While Trump is still underwater by a wide margin, a six‑point increase inside such strongly Democratic territory signals that voter attitudes in the country’s biggest population centers may be shifting in tone, if not allegiance.

    Urban voters matter because they anchor Democratic strength. 

    When they budge, even slightly, it often suggests that broader perceptions of presidential performance are settling in—especially among groups that have been highly resistant to Trump since his return to office.

    What People Are Saying

    Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who helps conduct Fox News polls with Democrat Chris Anderson, said: “The president faces two difficult obstacles—the virtually unanimous and intractable opposition of Democrats and the stubbornness of high prices. Republican officeholders think the economic benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill will kick in later this year, which will be critical for GOP prospects in the midterm elections.”

    White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Newsweek in December: “Over the past year, the Trump administration has delivered critical progress to turn the page on Joe Biden’s economic disaster: cooling inflation, rising real wages, private-sector job growth, and trillions in investments to make and hire in America. The Trump administration will continue to build on this progress in the new year to continue delivering economic relief for the American people.”

    President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on January 22: “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense. … Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling.”

    He added: “Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”

    What Happens Next

    The question now is whether Trump can build on this movement, or whether it represents a temporary fluctuation within a group that historically has little affinity for him.

    Because both Fox News surveys used identical methods and margins of error, the December‑to‑January comparison is significant. But subgroup margins are always higher, which means future polls must confirm whether Trump truly is gaining ground among city‑based voters or whether these numbers plateau.

    Still, if the trend holds—even modestly—it could matter in tightly contested states where major metro areas dominate the vote count.

    In a polarized era, the center is dismissed as bland. At Newsweek, ours is different: The Courageous Center—it’s not “both sides,” it’s sharp, challenging and alive with ideas. We follow facts, not factions. If that sounds like the kind of journalism you want to see thrive, we need you.

    When you become a Newsweek Member, you support a mission to keep the center strong and vibrant. Members enjoy: Ad-free browsing, exclusive content and editor conversations. Help keep the center courageous. Join today.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Donald Trump’s approval rating changes direction for first time in months 

    [ad_1]

    President Donald Trump’s approval rating has shifted for the first time in months, according to new data from two national polls.

    Newsweek contacted the White House for comment via email outside regular business hours. 

    Why It Matters

    As economic anxiety and public debate over foreign policy continue to dominate the national agenda, the change in Trump’s approval rating could have implications for both the White House and congressional prospects ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

    What To Know

    The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll—conducted online on January 4 and 5—surveyed 1,248 U.S. adults nationwide. 

    The poll showed Trump‘s overall approval rating climbing to 42 percent, up from 39 percent in December. 

    It marks his highest approval rating since October. The margin of error for this survey was about 3 percentage points.

    Similarly, a recent InsiderAdvantage poll gave Trump a positive net approval rating of 8.4 points, the strongest since August. 

    In that survey, 49.5 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s job performance, 41.1 percent disapproved, and 9.1 percent were undecided. 

    The poll surveyed 800 likely voters on December 20 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percent.

    Recent polling aggregates confirm that the president’s approval rating remains underwater, though there has been a modest uptick compared to late 2025. 

    As of January 6, Decision Desk HQ’s national average places approval at 43.2 percent and disapproval at 53.3 percent, while Ballotpedia’s index shows a similar split of 42 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval. 

    At the time of writing, VoteHub’s live tracker reported that 42.5 percent approved and 53.9 percent disapproved, reinforcing the consensus that disapproval still exceeded approval by double digits. 

    Still, this represents a slight improvement from November’s lows near 41 percent. The shift is incremental rather than dramatic, leaving the president with a persistent net-negative rating.

    Decision Desk HQ’s polling tracker combines all credible public polls that meet the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s standards into an average, focusing on recent data, limiting the impact of campaign-funded polls and smoothing trends as more polls come in to give a clearer picture of public opinion.

    Similarly, Ballotpedia’s index averages the latest polls from trusted national sources over the past 30 days to give an up-to-date picture of public opinion, updating daily as new results come in.

    VoteHub, meanwhile, averages recent polls from reputable pollsters, giving more weight to newer polls, to provide a clear and simple snapshot of public opinion.

    What People Are Saying

    Scott Tranter, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, told The Hill: “Roughly a year in, he’s right in the middle. He’s right where, basically, he’s been all year, which is unremarkable. It’s remarkable because it’s unremarkable.” 

    InsiderAdvantage pollster Matt Towery said in a December analysis: “Interestingly, our recent job performance surveys have shown the number of undecided respondents at an unusually high number. This tells us that some voters, particularly independents, remain unsure as to his accomplishments so far. This suggests he has work to do as he and the GOP enter the midterm season.”

    White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Newsweek last month: “President Trump and every member of his administration are clear-eyed about the fact that Americans continue to reel from the lingering effects of Joe Biden’s generational economic crisis.

    “Turning the Biden economic disaster around has informed nearly every action the Trump administration has taken since Day One, from unleashing American energy to cut gas prices to signing historic drug pricing deals to cut costs for American patients. 

    “Much work remains, and every member of the Trump administration continues to focus on recreating the historic job, wage, and economic growth that Americans enjoyed during President Trump’s first term.”

    Desai also previously told Newsweek: “President Trump inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation from Joe Biden’s incompetence, and his administration has rapidly cooled inflation to a 2.5 percent annualized rate. Americans can count on inflation continuing to fall and real wages continuing to rise.”

    President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social in December: “The polls are rigged even more than the writers. The real number is 64 percent, and why not, our Country is ‘hotter’ than ever before. Isn’t it nice to have a STRONG BORDER, No Inflation, a powerful Military, and great Economy??? Happy New Year!”

    What Happens Next

    The slight uptick in Trump’s approval rating coincides with major diplomatic and military actions—most notably the U.S. strike on Venezuela—and ongoing debates over economic performance, cost of living and party leadership heading into the midterm elections. 

    Polls show persistent concern among Americans about both economic and foreign policy developments, with majorities worried about prices, affordability and the U.S.’s role overseas. The administration’s policy decisions—both domestic and international—and the country’s day-to-day economic experiences are expected to be decisive in shaping public opinion and influencing the 2026 midterms.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Midwest has turned on Trump

    [ad_1]

    Once the heart of President Donald Trump’s political base, the Midwest — the region he promised to revive with factory jobs and “America First” trade policies — is showing signs of disillusionment.

    The latest TIPP Insights poll, conducted between September 30 and October 2, found Trump’s favorability in the Midwest at 40 percent favorable and 49 percent unfavorable, one of his weakest showings nationwide. The decline is striking given that Trump has long positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar workers and has frequently touted his record of reviving the region’s industrial economy.

    “I think of the Midwest as quintessentially the most ‘purple’ or swingy region in national politics,” J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Newsweek. “With that, it’s not too surprising to me that Trump’s approval there, -9, is roughly in line with where he is nationally.”

    Trump’s highest favorability was recorded in the Northeast (47 percent favorable, 43 percent unfavorable) — an unexpected result for one of the nation’s most liberal regions. He also performed well in the South (46 percent favorable, 43 percent unfavorable), where Republican registration remains strong.

    The West was Trump’s least favorable region, with 38 percent viewing him positively and 50 percent negatively.

    Newsweek Photo-Illustration/Getty/Canva/Associated Press

    The Midwest at the Heart of Trump’s 2024 Strategy

    The Midwest was central to Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign. He won eight of the 12 Midwestern states, flipping both Michigan and Wisconsin — two states he had narrowly lost in 2020. In Wisconsin, Trump won 49.6 percent of the vote to Kamala Harris’s 48.7 percent, while in Michigan he became the first Republican to carry the state twice since Ronald Reagan.

    His choice of Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate underscored the region’s political importance. Announcing the pick, Trump said Vance “will be strongly focused on … the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”

    At the time, Anthony Zurcher, the BBC’s North America correspondent, wrote that “the pick suggests Trump knows this election will be won and lost in a handful of industrial Midwest battleground states.”

    And ahead of that announcement, Angelia Wilson, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, England, told Newsweek: “Any reasonable political strategy points to Vance and the need to ensure a solid win in Ohio and the Rustbelt.”

    Trump’s Midwest Promise

    Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump returned repeatedly to the theme that only he could restore the region’s lost industrial power. In Saginaw, Michigan, he vowed to make the state once again the “car capital of the world,” blasting what he called “energy policies that are stripping jobs” from American workers. “Michigan, more than any other state, has lost 60 percent of your automobile business over the years,” he said.

    In Mosinee, Wisconsin, Trump leaned on trade threats as a key policy tool. Speaking at a rally, he warned of “unprecedented tariffs” against foreign competitors and argued that immigrants were displacing U.S. workers — framing his agenda as a defense of the industrial Midwest, Reuters reported.

    And in one of his most direct economic moves, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on John Deere if the agricultural giant shifted production to Mexico, a signal to Midwestern manufacturers that his “America First” stance still applied to them.

    Tariffs, Inflation, and the New Economic Anxiety

    But while Trump’s message of protectionism once resonated deeply across the Midwest, cracks are beginning to show. Many farmers and manufacturers are now feeling the pinch of tariffs that have reduced exports and driven down crop prices.

    “There have been constant headlines of farmers being caught in the middle of Trump’s tariff fights, so that might be an especially salient issue in the Midwest,” Coleman said.

    Trump has dramatically expanded U.S. tariffs since returning to office, marking one of the most sweeping protectionist shifts in decades. In February 2025, he imposed new duties of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on Chinese imports, citing national security concerns related to drug trafficking and border security, according to a White House fact sheet.

    Two months later, Trump issued Executive Order 14257, known as “Liberation Day,” introducing a 10 percent baseline tariff on nearly all imports and authorizing higher duties — in some cases up to 50 percent — on goods from countries accused of unfair trade practices. The order also revoked the de minimis exemption that had allowed low-value imports to enter the U.S. tariff-free, and expanded tariffs under existing laws such as Section 232 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The measures targeted key industries including autos, steel and aluminum.

    The administration has defended the tariffs as essential to rebuilding American manufacturing and protecting domestic jobs. But economists have warned of steep costs. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated the tariffs could reduce long-run GDP by six percent and lower wages by five percent, costing a typical middle-income household about $22,000 in lifetime income losses. The group also projected that the tariffs could raise between $4.5 and $5.2 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade — gains that could be offset by inflation and supply chain disruptions.

    For farmers, tariffs have been a thorn in their side since 2017, when Trump first imposed tariffs on key trading partners.

    Since then, American farmers have struggled with the loss of China as the top buyer of U.S. soybeans and a major market for corn. Exports of soybeans — America’s largest grain export by value — recently fell to a 20-year low, deepening fears that China may not purchase any U.S. grain this season.

    “With [tariffs] in place, we are not competitive with soybeans from Brazil,” Virginia Houston, director of government affairs at the American Soybean Association, told The Guardian. “No market can match China’s demand for soybeans. Right now, there is a 20 percent retaliatory duty from China.”

    Trump has said little publicly about the impact on farmers, though in August he demanded on Truth Social that China quadruple its soybean purchases. Chinese officials have instead pledged to boost domestic production by 38 percent by 2034, and U.S. farm groups say no new Chinese orders have been placed for the upcoming season.

    Despite the financial pain, many rural voters continue to back Trump, emphasizing that their support isn’t determined by a single issue like tariffs. 

    “Tariffs are probably something that will help in the long run,” Ohio farmer Brian Harbage, told The Guardian, acknowledging current export difficulties and economic uncertainty.

    To ease the strain, the Trump administration included $60 billion in farm subsidies in its latest tax bill, but critics argue the money favors large producers over family farms. Meanwhile, falling commodity prices, smaller cattle herds, and declining ethanol production have further weakened the sector.

    “The farm economy is in a much tougher place than where we were in 2018,” Houston said. “Prices have gone down while inputs – seed, fertilizer, chemicals, land and equipment – continue to go up.”

    Harbage said if Trump visited his farm, his message would be simple: “The exports is number one. That’s the number one fix. We have to get rid of what we’re growing, or we have to be able to use it. China, Mexico and Canada – we export $83 billion worth of commodities to them a year. So if they’re not buying, we’re stuck with our crop.”

    Renewable Energy Rift

    Trump’s opposition to renewable energy subsidies is also creating unease among farmers.

    In Iowa, where nearly two-thirds of electricity comes from wind and more than 50 wind-related companies operate, the end of federal incentives under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” has thrown the industry into turmoil. The cuts have imperiled $22 billion in wind investments and tens of thousands of jobs tied to wind manufacturing and land leases. Wind farms are the top taxpayer in a third of Iowa’s counties, contributing up to 55 percent of local property taxes and $91.4 million in annual lease payments to farmers, according to Power Up Iowa.

    Farmers and local officials warn that Trump’s policies threaten this economic lifeline. “I don’t know how anybody in good faith could vote against alternative energy if they’re elected by the people in Iowa,” Fort Madison Mayor Matt Mohrfeld, told Politico, calling the cuts “a crucial mistake.”

    Republicans argue that wind and solar are now “mature industries” that no longer need government help. But clean energy developers and local leaders say the rollback is already causing uncertainty, job losses, and halted projects — including the shutdown of Iowa wind manufacturer TPI Composites, which cited “industry-wide pressures” after losing federal support.

    Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright has argued that heavy federal government spending on renewable energy is “nonsensical.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    [ad_1]

    As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.

    In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.

    The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.

    Read: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.

    But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.

    That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls has been stuck at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. In the lastest Fox News poll, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.

    In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.

    But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.

    One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.

    The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.

    One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.

    Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”

    Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.

    Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”

    The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.

    Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.

    Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said they believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”

    That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.

    Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign.

    Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.

    Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.

    Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.

    “This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, Oh, he’s just a showman.”

    A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.

    “He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.

    Read: The Americans who need chaos

    Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. In the new CBS/YouGov poll, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: A survey of battleground states released yesterday by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.

    Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.

    In the 2022 election, Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • How Biden Might Recover

    How Biden Might Recover

    [ad_1]

    A press release that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign issued last week offered a revealing window into his advisers’ thinking about how he might overcome widespread discontent with his performance to win a second term next year.

    While the release focused mostly on portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to legal abortion, the most telling passage came when the Biden campaign urged the political press corps “to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.”

    That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term, especially if the president faces a rematch with Trump. With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.

    It’s common for presidents facing public disappointment in their performance to attempt to shift the public’s attention toward their rival. All embattled modern first-term presidents have insisted that voters will treat their reelection campaign as a choice, not a referendum. Biden is no exception. He routinely implores voters to compare him not “to the Almighty” but “to the alternative.”

    But it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less. The other recent presidents with approval ratings around Election Day as low as Biden’s are now were Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Both lost their bids for a second term. Continued cooling of inflation might allow Biden to improve his approval rating, which stands around 40 percent in most surveys (Gallup’s latest put it at only 37 percent). But if Biden can’t make big gains, he will secure a second term only if he wins more voters who are unhappy with his performance than any president in modern times.

    The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.

    Read: Republicans can’t figure it out

    If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.

    “I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

    Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice. Buffeted by disappointment in their tenure, both Carter and Bush decisively lost their reelection bids despite their enormous efforts to convince voters that their opponent could not be trusted with power.

    In this century, it’s become somewhat easier for presidents to overcome doubts about their performance by inflaming fears about their rival. Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004 had more success than Carter and the elder Bush at both mobilizing their core supporters and attracting swing voters by raising doubts about their opponent.

    Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.

    Read: Will Republicans pay a price for extremism?

    While more voters than in the past appear willing to treat presidential reelections as a choice rather than a referendum, Biden may need to push this dynamic to a new extreme. Obama and Bush both had approval ratings right around 50 percent in polling just before they won reelection; that meant they needed to convince only a slice of voters ambivalent about them that they would be even more unhappy with their opponent.

    Biden’s approval rating is much lower, and he is even further behind the majority approval enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 before they won decisive reelections.

    Those comparisons make clear that one crucial question confronting Biden is how much he can improve his own standing over the next year. The president has economic achievements he can tout to try to rebuild his support, particularly an investment boom in clean energy, semiconductors, and electric vehicles tied to the trio of major bills he passed. Unemployment is at historic lows, and in recent months wages have begun rising faster than prices. The latest economic reports show that inflation, which most analysts consider the primary reason for the public discontent with his tenure, is continuing to moderate.

    All of these factors may lift Biden, but probably only modestly. Even if prices for gas, groceries, and rent stop rising, that doesn’t mean they will fall back to the levels they were at when Biden took office. Voters appear unhappy not only about inflation, but about the Federal Reserve Board’s cure of higher interest rates, which has made it harder to purchase homes and cars and to finance credit-card debt. Biden also faces the challenge that some portion of his high disapproval rating is grounded not in dissatisfaction over current conditions, but in a belief that he’s too old to handle the job for another term. Better economic news won’t dispel that doubt.

    For all of these reasons, while Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.

    Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”

    For Biden, the key group could be voters who say they disapprove of his performance in office, but only “somewhat,” rather than “strongly.” The Democrats’ unusually good showing among those “somewhat” disapproving voters was a central reason the party performed unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterm election. But in an NBC national survey released earlier this week, Trump narrowly led Biden among those disenchanted voters, a result more in line with historic patterns.

    Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

    Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)

    But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.

    In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

    Poll results such as those scare Democratic strategists perhaps more than any other; they indicate that some voters may be growing more willing to accept what they didn’t like about Trump (chaos, vitriol, threats to democracy) because they think he’s an antidote for what they don’t like about Biden (his results on inflation, immigration, and crime.) Jim McLaughlin, a Trump-campaign pollster, told me earlier this year that because of their discouragement with Biden’s record, even some voters who say “I may not love the guy” are growing newly receptive to Trump. “The example I had people use is that he is like your annoying brother-in-law that you can’t stand but you know at the end of the day he’s a good husband, he’s a good father,” McLaughlin said.

    The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.

    Trump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • Why Commander Is No Longer His Master’s Dog

    Why Commander Is No Longer His Master’s Dog

    [ad_1]

    “Dog Bites Man,” in journalism lore, is a boring headline about a predictable event—a non-news story that should never be written, let alone read. But what if the dog in question belongs to the president of the United States? And what if the president’s dog bites not one man, but many?

    Joe and Jill Biden’s two-year-old German shepherd, Commander, is that dog. After the U.S. Secret Service confirmed late last month that Commander had been involved in 11 “biting incidents” at the White House, CNN reported this week that the canine had actually been even more prolific with his canines, biting several White House staffers. At some point in the past two weeks, Commander was sent away.

    “The President and First Lady care deeply about the safety of those who work at the White House and those who protect them every day,” Elizabeth Alexander, the communications director for the first lady, said in a statement to CNN. Commander, she added, “is not presently on the White House campus while next steps are evaluated.” Woof.

    Read: Basil the opossum has one eye, a big heart, and a job to do

    The whole situation has been traumatic. For the bite victims, of course—at least one of whom went to the hospital for treatment—but also for Commander, who now has to leave the only family he’s ever known. And for the Biden family: Not three full years into his administration, the president and the first lady have had to say goodbye to not one, but two family dogs. (The Bidens’ older dog, Major, was similarly expelled in 2021 for his own biting proclivity.)

    Banishing the Bidens’ dog is not just a matter of OSHA compliance. It’s political too.

    The flurry of really newsworthy dog-bites-man stories has been rough for the president, who comes off as both an unfeeling boss and a negligent dog owner. In the vortex of negative press—impeachment, Hunter Biden’s legal problems, inflation, dipping approval ratings—Commander’s bad behavior is practically the one negative news story that Biden can attempt to control.

    The Commander drama has been building toward a climax for months. Major bit a Secret Service agent shortly after moving into the White House, in 2021, and was subsequently sent to live with family friends in Delaware—not a euphemism, we’re told. Commander, the younger of the two, has been biting people for months. In July, reports emerged that the dog had attacked or bitten members of the Secret Service multiple times from last October to January of this year. (This pattern added injury to insult in an already tense relationship between the Biden administration and the Secret Service, many of whom are reportedly fans of Donald Trump.)

    Olga Khazan: I don’t like dogs

    As if that situation was not fraught enough, we now know that Commander has chomped on more arms and legs than was previously reported, including on a number of White House executive staffers’. Asked where the dog was taken, Alexander, the East Wing spokesperson, declined to comment directly. She also did not comment on how the Biden family is feeling, though that’s easy to guess: sad, sort of embarrassed, probably annoyed by all the dog coverage when Republicans in Congress are engaged in their own very public brawling.

    More than anything, though, I wonder how Commander feels—and whether things might have turned out better if more consideration had been given to that question.

    The life of a president’s dog can be stressful. The White House is a working office and a public museum as well as a home, with multitudes of people coming in and out all the time. Even on a normal day, the scene can be a chaotic sensory overload for a dog: Rotating members of the Secret Service detail, uniformed and not, stand outside every room, earpieces in, eyes darting, faces unsmiling; aides fly through doorways with varying degrees of excitement and alarm, waving papers. And the first family is always leaving on trips and official visits; sometimes they bring the dog; other times they leave him behind in the care of a butler or an operating engineer, who is on-site around the clock.

    All of this is difficult for a human to adjust to, let alone a dog with limited English comprehension who cannot understand that his owner is the most important person in the Western world.

    Read: Dogs needs understanding, not dominance

    Presidential pets always take some time to acclimate, according to Jennifer Pickens, the author of Pets at the White House. Eventually, most White House dogs have been able to adapt to the schedule of nights in the first family’s residence, and days with the run of the building (or parts of it). They might spend time sleeping in the chief usher’s office or waiting for the president in the Outer Oval. They’ll go on regular walks through the 18-acre White House campus with Dale Haney, who has been the groundskeeper and unofficial presidential dog handler since he first tended to Richard Nixon’s Irish setter, King Timahoe. During the George W. Bush administration, the president’s squat little Scottish terrier, Barney, liked to follow the pastry chef around in the basement hallways, licking powdered sugar from his shoes, Pickens told me. Bo and Sunny Obama, the 44th president’s Portuguese water dogs, were accustomed to being paraded around for snuggles from children visiting the White House.

    But other dogs don’t settle in so easily—or they become irritated by the attention. After all, they don’t get to choose to become part of the first family: In 1961, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Kennedy family a fluffy white puppy named Pushinka, whose mother had been shot into space on Sputnik 5. Pushinka—who went on to have her own puppies, which John F. Kennedy referred to as the “pupniks”—became “a little nippy” later in life, according to Caroline Kennedy.

    The adjustment to White House life has been a challenge for many presidential pooches. Ronald Reagan’s 65-pound Bouvier des Flandres, Lucky, was sent back to the family’s Santa Barbara ranch after a few months, because she was deemed “a little too much for the Reagan White House,” Pickens said. One of the Carter family mutts, JB—short for Jet Black—used to snap at the maids and butlers, Gary Walters, a former chief usher, told me. The dog nipped at Walters on occasion too: “We’d just say, ‘Oh, JB, shut up and go away.’” In 2008, Barney bit the finger of Jon Decker when the Reuters reporter reached out to pet him; Barney could be, as Jenna Bush put it later, “a real jerk.”

    I wish I could tell Commander all of this—that dogs act like dogs, and sometimes like real jerks, even when they live in the White House.

    Read: What kind of villain doesn’t clean up after their dog

    Commander’s adjustment to White House life may have been more challenging than it was for other pets. Although German shepherds can be loyal and trustworthy companions, they have to be diligently trained, especially during their adolescent months, Sue Kewley, a dog behaviorist who specializes in the breed, told me. “I don’t think people realize how sensitive German shepherds can be,” she said. They’re herding dogs, and “if you don’t give them a job to do, they’ll go self-employed.”

    Young shepherds need to be taught how to behave when a visitor or stranger arrives—how to go to their “place” or grab a toy, something that desensitizes them to the constant flow of bodies coming and going. This appears to be the gap in Commander’s education. “He’s been allowed to make mistakes, which is a real shame,” Kewley said. “But I don’t blame him. It’s not his fault.”

    It probably didn’t have to be this way, in other words. With better training and more attention, Commander might have been able to stay in the White House. As with other presidential dogs, he could have been an emblem for the president, something happy and sweet for the American people to latch on to. Instead, he’s become a workplace hazard, an unfortunate headline, and now, sadly, an exile.

    [ad_2]

    Elaine Godfrey

    Source link