The foreign observer may have a hard time believing or understanding this, but a recent NBC News poll confirmed it: nine months after Joe Biden took office, Americans see him more or less like his predecessor, Donald Trump: 54% of Americans disapprove of his actions; and 71% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Even more troubling, however, is the fact that the percentage of Americans who vote positively or negatively for Joe Biden (40% and 48% respectively) is almost identical to that of Trump in the same poll (38% and 50% respectively).
None of this, of course, justifies Trump's jokes (on Fox News on Sunday) that Biden is “the worst president in history.” “I used to say that the worst was Jimmy Carter. And to be honest, I'm not a fan of the way Bush got us involved in the Middle East. “But I think this is the worst presidency in our history,” he said. The truth is, from 1953 onwards, there was only one American president with the worst popularity of Biden at this point in his presidency – but it was Trump himself, with a turnout of just 37%.
Up and down
“The polls will go up and down and up and down,” Joe Biden himself said at the weekend from Rome, where he continued at the G20 summit to try to overturn his predecessor's critical policies and approaches – he lifted tariffs on agreed on ways to revive Iran nuclear talks, agreed on the need to adopt a minimum tax rate on multinational companies, and cut off all financing … He himself tried to present some of these agreements as part of his broader goal of “a foreign policy for the middle class” – the American middle class. Based on opinion polls and analysts' views, however, Biden has signs ahead that the United States is turning against what it calls “big government,” a government that has big responsibilities and interventions, just as he is trying to makes the US government much bigger.
Excessive things
According to another recent Gallup poll, 52% of Americans think the government is “trying to do too much” – while last year, at the height of the pandemic, a similar percentage called on the government to do more. So perhaps this historic American predisposition, with the exception of times of crisis, to a more limited government is to blame. Perhaps it is also the fault of what Edward Lewis points out in the Financial Times that the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to say for whom, instead of against, the Democrats: the party houses many tendencies, ranging roughly from the traditional Christian Democrats of Italy to the corbinate wing of the British Labor Party, and its majorities in both Parliament and the Senate are so small that each wing has a practical veto on the content of Biden's bill under the general motto “Even though there are more progressives than moderates, Biden, instead of drawing his red lines, is constantly moving along the sands of negotiations.
The achievements
Ideally, Lewis notes, a party in power should claim the vote of the people by publicizing its achievements. In their absence, the second best thing he can do is intimidate voters about the alternative: and that is the essence of Democratic Terry McAuliffe's campaign for the Virginia government. In today's election, McLaughlin is fighting to keep the state in the Democratic camp against the pro-Trump Glen Gangin. A battle that has been hailed as a referendum on Joe Biden himself, but which McAuliffe has sought to turn into a referendum around Trump: in recent weeks, the word “Biden” has almost disappeared from his campaign ads. Joe Biden's best weapon, Lewis sums up, is still Donald Trump – but for how much longer?
