Can the 2022 Dem candidates "decouple" from Biden?

At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelly asks: “What’s Behind Biden’s Record-Low Approval Rating”? My answer is, you name it.

A president’s support is a function of (1) confidence in his handling of the economy, which is determined almost entirely by how the economy is performing, (2) confidence in the man’s general leadership qualities, (3) confidence in his ability to handle non-economic crises, and (4) his likeability.

Any objective observer would have to give Biden exceptionally low marks on the first three tests. The economy is a mess, thanks mainly to inflation the likes of which we haven’t experienced in decades.

It’s impossible to have confidence in Biden’s leadership. He is viewed by most Americans as too old and faltering for the job, and he reinforces that perception with almost every bumbling, stumbling public appearance.

Confidence in Biden’s ability to handle a crisis, already low due to the persistence of the pandemic, disappeared with the disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan. Indeed, the sharp downturn in Biden’s approval rating can be traced back to his shameful handling of our withdrawal.

The fourth test — likeability — is subjective. I find Biden exceptionally unlikeable, but most Americans probably just consider him blah. Blah won’t cut it for a president who scores so poorly on the other three tests.

The interesting question isn’t what’s behind Biden’s record-low approval rating. The interesting questions are: (1) what effect will it have on the 2022 election and (2) will Biden’s approval rating improve in time for the 2024 election.

One can only speculate about the second question, as well as the related one of whether Biden will be the Democrat’s nominee in 2024. Therefore, I ‘ll confine this discussion to the impact of Biden’s record-shattering unpopularity on the election this November.

On this subject, Skelly writes:

The historical relationship between presidential approval and the performance of the president’s party in midterm elections should scare Democrats. Generally speaking, the worse a president’s approval is, the more seats that party tends to lose in the House. . . Three of the four presidents preceding Biden saw their party lose at least 40 House seats in their first midterm election.

The exception was Bush, whose party actually gained six seats in the 2002 election, but he had an unusually high approval rating at the time of his first midterm. That’s still notable, though, because it means it has taken that kind of anomaly to see the president’s party suffer fewer losses — or even achieve gains — in House elections.

But some analysts, such as Joe Trippi and Ron Brownstein, suggest that voters are “decoupling” their view of Biden from their view of Democrats in general. Such a decoupling would require voters to overlook the role of congressional Democrats in contributing to inflation by voting for Biden’s spending packages. And let’s not forget that the Democratic establishment thought it was good idea to nominate Biden in 2020

Nonetheless, I believe Democratic voters will do the decoupling. And Biden’s declining approval rating among Democrats — in the low 70s — probably accounts for his slide to below 40 percent overall. Democratic candidates for the House and Senate should be able to count on support from most Dem voters who are dissatisfied with Biden.

But even a presidential approval rating in the low 40s normally spells mid-term disaster for his party. And while Democrats can easily decouple, independent voters are another matter. It is they, not registered Democrats, who will largely determine the outcome of the midterms.

The voting patterns of independents in midterm elections have always been heavily influenced by their approval or disapproval of the incumbent president. What reason is there to believe things will be different in 2022?

I can think of only two possibilities: the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs and the quality of the candidates for key House and Senate seats.

I don’t discount the possibility of a Dobbs-related bounce for Democrats. But it if occurs, it will be because the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade energized Democratic voters.

Independents have more nuanced views on abortion, and the issue isn’t likely to override their concern about the economy and the general course the country has taken since the Democrats won the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Ed Morrissey puts it well:

Expecting people to just ignore that massive bait-and-switch with Biden by Democrats in 2020 and the extremist incompetence that resulted from it is fantasy thinking in its most desperate.

But while voters can’t be expected to ignore two years of disastrous Democratic rule, neither can they be expected to ignore the quality of the candidates they are asked to choose between. Will the uneven quality of this year’s GOP candidates enable Democrats to dodge what might otherwise be a big red wave?

Not when it comes to control of the House. Even if the Republicans lose a few seats due to bad candidates — and I don’t know that they will — this won’t prevent the GOP from picking up the seats it needs to take back the House and do so pretty handily.

Thus, FiveThirtyEight puts the likelihood of Republicans winning the House at 87 percent. And that’s probably conservative.

But poor candidates might prevent the GOP from taking control of the Senate, an outcome to which FiveThirtyEight assigns only a 53 percent likelihood. I made that case in this post and won’t repeat it now.

However, I will note a new poll from Georgia. Conducted jointly for AARP by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Biden pollster John Anzalone, it found Sen. Raphael Warnock leading Republican Herschel Walker 50% to 47%.

The same pollsters found Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp leading Stacey Abrams by seven points. It also had Joe Biden’s approval rating at only 34%.

Thus, according to this poll, Walker is running 10 points worse than Kemp. And Warnock is running a remarkable 16 points ahead of Biden approval rating.

I call that decoupling. If this happens in one or two other key battleground states, it will probably enable Democrats to retain control of the Senate.