I Think I Can Explain Joe Biden’s Bad Approval Ratings (2024)

In January of 1980, Jimmy Carter had been in office for three years, and the economy was terrible. Cumulatively, consumer prices were up more than 32 percent since he had entered the White House, and they had been rising steadily for more than 18 months. The unemployment rate was on the rise, after averaging 6.3 percent across his time in office. Wages, adjusted for inflation, had been falling for a year, gas prices were surging, and the interest rate on a typical home mortgage was over 15 percent. Things were very bad, and getting worse.

In the most preposterous corners of American economic discourse, Biden’s economy is still being compared to Carter’s, even though by every available metric, the 1970s were in a miserable league of their own, and today’s economy is among the most prosperous on record. Biden isn’t just clearing the low bar set by the Carter administration, he’s besting every other leader in the developed world, with the United States enjoying stronger wages, lower inflation, and better job growth than any nation in the G7, and its best labor market in at least half a century.

But one item that all of these ridiculous Carter-Biden comparisons universally fail to note is that Carter was, in January 1980, a very popular president. The economic consequences of his administration notwithstanding, Carter’s January 1980 approval rating was 58 percent. This was his high-water mark, but it was also not a fluke. He enjoyed an approval rating of over 50 percent in six consecutive Gallup polls across more than three months in which his economy was thoroughly, positively, undoubtedly in the toilet. A gross toilet, full of harmful odors and bacteria.

In January of 2024, however, Joe Biden’s approval rating was just 41 percent—17 points below Carter’s mark at the same point in his presidency, despite Biden’s vastly superior economic performance. According to Gallup, you have to go back to Harry Truman to find a president who consistently polls as badly as Biden does, and his numbers appear impervious to economic data. No matter what has happened to wages, prices, or employment, Biden’s approval rating has been in the same, dark place since October of 2021.

Something is wrecking Joe Biden, but it isn’t the economy—at least the economy that economists know how to measure—and it isn’t inflation.

None of this has prevented Biden’s critics from declaring him an economic failure. They have instead shifted the goalposts. The warning cry of the early Biden years was “stagflation“—the simultaneous deluge of high unemployment and high inflation that defined the 1970s. Stagflation was just around the corner, and it was going to be awful. But that corner seemed to slip farther and farther away as unemployment remained stubbornly low and economic growth stubbornly high, so negative commentary began to focus exclusively on inflation. This remained a popular approach until inflation, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. According to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, prices rose just 2.7 percent between April of 2023 and April of 2024. Two-point-seven is higher than zero, but price changes at this pace are simply not perceptible to anyone except economists.

With inflation functionally over, the search has now shifted to some other kind of price metric that can explain Biden’s terrible polling. The Washington Post editorial board hypothesizes that the country is experiencing “an inflation hangover,” feeling squeamish about higher price levels even though prices are no longer increasing at a meaningful rate. In the Post’s telling, people credit themselves for raises and promotions, and blame the president for bad news on prices.

These psychological rationales are plausible enough, but voter views of Biden and the economy are still way out of line with historical precedent. The 17.9 percent cumulative price increase across the first three years of Biden’s presidency is more comparable to Reagan’s (17 percent), Nixon’s (15.4 percent), and George H.W. Bush’s (14.1 percent) than it is to Carter’s (32.8 percent), and yet Biden is substantially less popular than all of these guys —52 percent approval for Reagan, 49 percent for Nixon, 47 percent for George H.W. Bush, and 41 percent for Biden.

Writing for Bloomberg, John Authers opines that the trouble is not general prices but the prices of “essentials” like food and energy, which disproportionately hurt the most economically vulnerable. “This makes the many who were already slipping behind even worse off,” Authers writes, “even though the overall economy is in decent shape.” It’s a creative suggestion, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Adjusted for inflation, wages and disposable income are up for most people since Biden took office, and wage growth has been strongest among households at the bottom of the income ladder. Household costs have been rising, but they’ve been more than offset by income gains.

So to recap, Biden’s problem is not stagflation, inflation, or the price level or the affordability of basic necessities. The magic metric quest continues through Matt Yglesias, who argues that while household incomes are indeed improving for most people, they are now improving at a slower rate than they were before the pandemic. This observation has the benefit of being true at the cost of being unpersuasive. Biden has enjoyed stronger inflation-adjusted wages during his first term than, for instance, Barack Obama did, but Obama enjoyed substantially higher approval ratings (and despite an unemployment rate over 9 percent for most of his first term).

Yglesias contends that Biden basically screwed up by spending too much money. A greater emphasis on “deficit reduction,” he claims, would have rescued Biden’s polling. But attacking inflation through deficit reduction requires an assault on household incomes. The idea is to bring down the prices companies charge by reducing their customers’ ability to pay. It is not clear that diminishing family incomes would have produced a higher American standard of living or a more popular president.

Had reckless overspending been Biden’s problem—a problem long associated with the 1970s—higher unemployment would have been required to tame inflation over the past two years. But of course this was not the case. The unemployment rate has remained at or below 4 percent since December of 2021 and inflation came down anyway, because post-pandemic inflation was largely a product of supply disruptions, not an excess of liberal largesse.

Biden did spend a lot of money—at least $4 trillion, all told, on infrastructure, clean energy development, domestic computer chip factories and direct payments to households. Globally, the United States spent significantly more than the governments of other developed countries on pandemic relief and recovery. But alas for the haters, it didn’t screw up the economy. The United States ultimately recovered from the COVID-19 crash faster, with lower inflation (Biden is, in fact, the most popular leader in the G7).

Inflation hasn’t been good for Biden, of course, even if it can’t explain his rotten approval ratings. Voters consistently say they hate how expensive everything is, and this is almost certainly true, though voters also say plenty of things about the economy that are not true. According to CBS News, 56 percent of Americans believe the United States is currently mired in a recession, with about half of the country saying the unemployment rate is near a 50-year high, and half of the country believing the stock market is negative (wrong, wrong, and wrong).

I don’t have a pat explanation for Biden’s bad polling or all of these weird readings on economic sentiment. My best guess is that housing is a significant part of it. Housing has been unusually expensive since the pandemic due to two mass moving events—city people running to the country, then running back to the city—after a decade of underconstruction. Housing is not only the single largest expense for most families, it’s tied to other big-picture family concerns—commutes, school quality, parks, crime—which I suspect most people ultimately care more about than the price of groceries, even though nobody likes paying more for eggs.

People don’t talk about it much anymore, but the pandemic was rough, and it was in full swing across Biden’s first year in office. One million Americans died in the first few waves, and a lot of things in the post-pandemic era still don’t really work. Millions of students still haven’t recovered from pandemic-era learning loss. It takes forever to see a doctor. Whole neighborhoods get drawn into oddball conflicts. The last two cold and flu seasons were so horrendous that there were national shortages of children’s Tylenol and children’s Motrin.

One thing people like to do after a bad stretch is start over. And if you can’t afford to move, you can’t afford a fresh start, even if wage growth is steadily improving your purchasing power. Voters may be wrong about the economy, but it’s hard to blame them for wanting a new beginning.