Reviewing Joe Biden's First Year in the White House by the Numbers
In January 20, 2021, Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump for President of the United States. He ran on a platform in which he called for unity and made other campaign promises like "shutting down" SARS-COV-2. It has been a year since he has taken office. How have he and his administration done? Short answer: Not so good.
What the Numbers Say
I'm not a huge fan of polls as they tend to be off from the actual values. On top of that, polls greatly vary by sample size as well as sample type. Some pollsters sample generic adults whereas others sample only likely voters. However, even if they may not be accurate, you can still extract useful information by analyzing trends.
Let's look at Biden's job approval from the RealClearPolitics aggregate. When he took over the White House, he started in the mid-50s in approval and mid-30s in disapproval. Throughout 2021, his approval remained above 50%, but his disapproval gradually increased. In mid-August, his disapproval rating spiked while his approval dropped and since then, Biden has had a net disapproval rating. As of today, his approval is at an all-time low at 40.5% and an all-time high at 55.3% for a -14.8% margin.
Compared to Trump's first year, it depends on how you look at the data. If you judge by margin, Biden did slightly better with Trump's net approval in January 21, 2018 which clocked at -15.5%. If you are to judge by overall movement, however, Biden did much worse. He went from +19.5% to -14.8% which made for a -34.3% shift. In contrast, Trump went from a +0.1% margin to -15.5% for a net movement of -15.6%.
Civiqs, which uses a different methodology, showed similar trends albeit with different numbers. Biden started off with 48% approval and 43% disapproval. Unlike on RCP, approval and disapproval were split from late February to late May. Currently, his approval is 34% and disapproval is 56%, respectively at all-time low and high. Trump started off at 42% approval and 51% disapproval. At the same point in his presidency, that changed to 42% approval and 54% disapproval. Unlike on RCP, Trump actually did better than Biden on all phases: higher approval, lower disapproval, and smaller net negative movement.
The numbers are also interesting when you break it up by political affiliation. 72% of democrats approve of Biden's job performance whereas 12% disapprove. Republicans overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden's performance at 96% with only 2% approving. Biden's approval/disapproval rating among independents is 21%/67%. This is quite significant as even when taking into account January 6, 2021, Trump still had higher in-party net approval (85%/11%) as well as higher independent net approval (39%/56%). Another interesting tidbit is that Trump never fell below 36% approval nor exceeded 57% disapproval with independents throughout his presidency.
If you're wondering how Kamala Harris is doing numbers-wise, they are even worse.
What Happened?
As you can see, Biden's numbers are tanking. While we don't know his real approval/disapproval, we can conclude he has lost substantial support (-34.3% shift on RCP or -27% on Civiqs). The question is why such a large fall from grace?
The short, clickbaity answer is "everything". The longer answer is issues such as the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and SARS-COV-2 worsened under Biden and his administration's watch. This is also reflected under RealClearPolitics when accessing Biden's job performance on those specific issues.
Beginning in April 2021, nearly every jobs report from then on yielded underwhelming numbers. In some of them, the number of added jobs fell short of projections by a substantial margin. The April 2021, September 2021, and December 2021 jobs reports, for instance, fell below projections by about 75%, 60%, and 50%, respectively. In addition, the inflation rate has reached 7% with the producer price index growing at its fastest pace since records began in 2010.
With prices of goods rising as well as shelves literally going bare in some stores, Americans have grown concerned on whether they can make ends meet and put food on the table. Biden, however, did not catch the memo. As most Americans wanted the federal government to refrain from passing more expensive bills which would further exacerbate inflation, he kept insisting on pushing the Build Back Better bill and greenlit gaslighting tweets like this one (more context here):
While Biden claimed that Build Back Better would not cost anything, the Congressional Budget Office came out with a report that it would add $3 trillion to the deficit from 2022 to 2031. Such an expensive bill made moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema hesitant. Despite both senators expressing how much slimmer they preferred the bill to be, Biden was largely uncompromising. Unsurprisingly, Build Back Better failed to pass in the senate.
As for immigration, just this figure from the US Customs and Border Protection website says it all:
On top of that, the Biden administration attempted to rescind the "Remain in Mexico" policy that began under Trump. However, the District Court for Northern Texas ruled the administration's action was illegal. The administration appealed the decision to the 5th Circuit Court and the Supreme Court of which the both shot it down with the Supreme Court sending this rather terse letter. On top of what, despite the fact that Biden appointed Harris to take charge at figuring out the root causes of the border crisis, Harris has done little. In fact, she has yet to actually visit the southern border, let alone visiting the problem areas.
The problems did not end in the domestic department, but also on the international stage. Biden's biggest foreign policy blunder which was also responsible for tanking his approval on RealClearPolitics, was messing up the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump and the Taliban reached a deal to have all US troops withdrawn by May 2021. Biden moved that date back to September 11, 2021, to which the Taliban responded by capturing territory. The US military also made baffling decisions such as abandoning the Bagram airfield without telling the new Afghan commander at the time and not evacuating US citizens and allies first. On July 8, 2021, a reporter expressed concern to Biden over the deteriorating situation in the country to which he responded that "the likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely". That turned out to be a gross miscalculation that left many Americans stranded in Afghanistan.
Even the issue Biden is the strongest at has become a liability. Before his approval on how he handled SARS-COV-2 was not just in the double digits, but in the realm of +30s or even +40s in some polls. Now, he has a net disapproval rating and that margin may still be growing. Much of that decline came from a series of blunders that added up. First was the test shortage after the Omicron variant began to overtake the Delta variant. Despite being warned by health experts of the impending shortage, the Biden administration came out ill-prepared for the Christmas surge. When Kamala Harris was asked about this in her interview with NBC News' Craig Melvin, she greatly struggled to come up with clear answers.
Harris's answer to 1:47 was extremely painful.
Biden's political opponents also did not hesitate to use his own words against him. During his 2020 campaign, he claimed that Trump was unfit for office as the latter oversaw 220,000 deaths from SARS-COV-2. As pointed out by Neil Patel from RealClearPolitics, "by [Biden's] metric, Biden is now responsible for 400,000 COVID-19 deaths -- the opposite of his promise to come in and 'shut down' the virus".
Lastly, the Supreme Court handed Biden and his administration a significant political defeat regarding his vaccine mandate. Throughout 2021, Biden and his administration wanted to impose a federal SARS-COV-2 vaccine mandate on large employers. That order ultimately got shot down in the Supreme Court by a 6-3 margin, stating that a federal agency did not have such powers to authorize vaccine requirements on large businesses. I think had Biden took a more diplomatic approach rather than trying to brute force the issue, he would have gotten better results.
Closing Thoughts
Just judging from the overall movement in the polls, Biden (and by extension, his administration) had a very unsuccessful first year. Across the board, Biden messed up on key issues such as the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and the coronavirus. Much of his administration's woes were self-inflicted. For instance, the inflation would not have risen to such a high rate had government spending was restrained. Americans would not have been stranded in Afghanistan had Biden ordered for their evacuation first before withdrawing troops.
As a result, his job performance has left many Americans frustrated. Independents, of which the majority voted for Biden in the 2020 general election, are now turning their backs on him according to Civiqs. Even Biden's approval with the democrats is not particularly stable and democrat candidates have grown frustrated over his lack of engagement. Hispanic voters, who used to be a reliable democrat voterbase, are starting to swing to the republican side. That has led to events like 85% Hispanic border town McAllen, Texas electing a republican mayor which used to be a strong democrat stronghold, Virginia electing Glenn Youngkin for governor, and Jack Ciattarelli nearly pulling off an upset in the New Jersey gubernatorial race.
