No Joke: Blunderin’ Biden Crashes to 37% Approval

BUCK: Joe Biden. How’s it going? How’s it going, Joe? No joke. Not so good. Not if you look at his numbers, not if you see what’s actually happening in the eyes of the American people. The latest right now is that you’ve got Biden with a 37% — according to USA Today poll — approval rating, 59% disapproval. The good news for Biden is that people are even more disapproving of Kamala Harris.

So not that anyone really cares, but if you think she’s gonna take over for him at some point, it does matter. Harris has a 27% approval rating, 51% disapproving, and this comes right when we’ve seen the infrastructure bill passed and going to Biden’s desk. Clay, it seems to me like they’ve been hoping after the Tuesday election shellacking that they took, “Oh, we’re gonna start spending a bunch of money and people are gonna realize things are much better than they think they are.” So far that, at least, has not sunk in yet, and I think the Biden administration is running out of rabbits to pull out of the hat, so to speak. I think they’re running out of room to maneuver.

CLAY: At some point, Buck, you get defined and you are what people decide that you are, and that can be both good or bad. And Biden, it is very, very bad: 37-38% approval rating in the most recent USA Today poll. Kamala Harris 28%. Putting those numbers into context, Buck, at no point in either of our lives has a president and a vice president been this lowly regarded by the American public.

You and I are around… You’re about to have the 40th birthday. Two generations between us. Never in either of our lives has there ever been a point where a president and a vice president were this far underwater, and I just saw, as you started the show, CNN came out with their own poll, and it says, “Does Biden have the right priorities?” Well, 42% said “yes,” 58% said “no.”

When a CNN poll is nearly 60% say Biden has the wrong priorities, and the way that they are collapsing — 36%, Buck, of independents said that Joe Biden has the right priorities. Only 75% of Democrats said Joe Biden has the right priorities. This is an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party, and the question we asked, “What was gonna be the fallout?” Well, we’ll talk about infrastructure, I’m sure, during the course of today’s show and the decisions that were made there.

But the biggest fallout in terms of the midterms so far is number of Democrats — I think we’re up to 12 now — who hold House of Representatives seats and are not rerunning. Most of those are very competitive marketplaces. And if you look at the overall trend lines for which party is favored, we’re talking about 40 or 50 seats, potentially, that the Democrats are going to lose in 2022, which means the Republicans would have a decent majority.

BUCK: I believe it was Yogi Berra who said “deja vu all over again,” and that’s a way of looking at this with the 2010 midterm election that Obama faced — those numbers — the Tea Party wave, which changed the Republican Party, changed conservatism for a generation, really. You look at how many people came into politics at that point in time and what an upsurge there was from the grassroots level. I think you’re facing something similar, and you can tell the White House is a little bit flustered.