The CIVIQS poll is a bit of an outlier among national surveys on Joe Biden’s approval rating, for a couple of reasons which shouldn’t make people discount its findings.
First, CIVIQS doesn’t do telephone surveys. It has built a sizable universe of polling respondents across the country, and it goes back to them periodically to run a tracking poll on Biden’s approval.
That universe is over 100,000 people. Not many polling organizations do this kind of thing.
CIVIQS also relies on online responses. That could be a factor that skews the results a bit — you could perhaps look at a purely online polling program and conclude it’s going to select out potential respondents who are (1) older and (2) downscale, in that those will be the folks less likely to have or use the internet (they’re a lot more likely to answer telephone surveys).
But all polling will have its flaws.
The thing about the CIVIQS poll, as it has tracked Biden’s approval, is that while it’s been an outlier among all the other approval polls out there, it’s operated on the leading edge of the curve.
CIVIQS showed Biden in the mid-30s in approval, and other polls showed him in the mid-40s. Then his performance in those polls gradually ratcheted down to where CIVIQS had him.
And the CIVIQS numbers gradually ratcheted down as well.
To the point where CIVIQS now shows Biden at a mere 30 percent approval:
President Joe Biden is underwater in 48 states — including the typically dark blue California and his home state of Delaware — while his approval rating is down to the lowest in his presidency, at only 30 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval, according to the most recent CIVIQS rolling job-approval average on July 3.
While twelve percent of survey participants do not approve or disapprove, Biden’s approval rating is underwater in 48 states. The only two exceptions are Hawaii (45 to 42 percent) and Vermont (44 to 38 percent). The president’s net approval is at negative 28.
Yup, that’s a disaster, all right.
Here’s what’s really awful about it:
- Among 18-34-year-olds, he’s down 22-59.
- Among 35-49-year-olds, he’s down 27-59.
- He’s down 28-59 among non-college grads. That seems pretty terrible, and then you see that among college grads he’s down 32-58, which isn’t a whole lot better.
- Men hate Joe Biden like poison. He’s sitting underwater at 26-65 with male respondents. It isn’t like he’s doing too much better with women — he’s down 34-51 there.
- Democrats approve of him 65-16. The guess is a whole bunch of them are lying. Republicans aren’t; Biden has a grand total of 2 percent approval (Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney must be part of the survey). Among independents? Nineteen up, 68 down.
- He’s down 24-66 with white voters. There was this narrative that said white suburban women were where Biden’s strength was, but white women can’t stand him. Biden is down 28-60 with white women. With white men he’s underwater to the tune of 20-73. Those are numbers that rival the poor performance of the Mitt Romney–style Republicans with black voters.
- Younger white voters really hate Biden. He’s down 18-66 with the 18-34 set and 21-67 with the 35-49 crowd. But older white voters can’t stand him, either; Biden’s disapproval is 63 percent with the white 65-plus contingent.
- White Democrats give Biden a 69-13 advantage. White Republicans have it the other way 1 percent up, 97 percent down. Take that, NeverTrumpers! Oh, and white independents? Nineteen up, 68 down, just like the overall numbers for independents.
- Among Hispanics, Biden is down 37-47. Younger Hispanics see him pretty much the same way white people do. He’s down 25-54 with the 18-34 crowd and 36-50 with the 35-49-year-olds. Older Hispanics have him ahead for some reason.
- Black voters are Biden’s last redoubt, but those walls are also crumbling. He’s up 56-23 with black voters overall, which seems like a decent number until you realize how critical a near-unanimous black vote is to the Democrat Party these days. Biden’s erosion in the black community can be seen among 18-34-year-olds, where he’s actually underwater at 32-36, and among black men. He’s at 53-29 overall among black men, but black men 18-34 have him down 32-44. Non-college graduate black men give him a pretty tepid 51-30 number.
It isn’t a joke, or at least it’s not completely a joke, to say Joe Biden is beginning to unite the country against him.
The problem is, nothing about this is funny. While partisan Democrats, whose numbers are sagging pretty badly as their party abjectly fails at every task of government where they’re in power, are still going through the motions and parroting the lines they’re given, virtually everyone else doesn’t just notice how bad things are but are getting angrier and angrier about it.
And Team Biden now thinks it’s a good idea to blame gas stations, which are mostly mom-and-pop small businesses with some of the most diverse ownership of any commercial enterprises and which operate on scandalously low profit margins, for fuel prices.
That tells you the numbers in the current CIVIQS poll probably won’t be an outlier for too long. And that if Biden slips into the 20s with CIVIQS in the near future, those numbers will be a harbinger more than an outlier as well.
The vortex continues to grow, and it continues to spin more and more rapidly. And we’ve all been sucked into it now. We still have two and a half more years of this transformationally awful presidency.
If there is any positive to be taken from this, it’s something I wrote about in The Revivalist Manifesto, my new book just recently released by Bombardier Books. One of the key theses of the book is that transformationally awful presidencies tend to wipe out the political party responsible for them for a generation, and begin entirely new political eras after the suffering of the public at the hands of the incompetents is paid back at the ballot box.
James Buchanan was such a president. So was Herbert Hoover. And Joe Biden is a larger disaster than either. At the bottom of his vortex is a completely new American story, and perhaps the revival we so badly need.
