Why isn't Biden more popular? [closed]

Question

In the past more moderate leaders get very high approvals. Joe Biden ran as a moderate and seems to be governing like one. Even today you have this effect happen at the local level. Charlie Baker the governor of Massachusetts has higher approval with Democrats even though he ran as a Republican (!).

Yet Biden is a highly polarizing figure despite some of his efforts not to be. Obama for example had a far more volatile approval, but he was the last president to have such an elastic approval rating. It is approve by 9 on 538, which past approval vs election correlations show is very similar to Biden's margin in the popular vote.

Why is Biden's approval so polarized while certain people are able to escape polarization at least partly, even at the federal level?

Answer 1

This is my opinion.

Biden may have run as a moderate, which helped him get elected, but he's been governing more progressively. His American Jobs Plan is full of progressive proposals, although not as aggressive as the Green New Deal (I know this isn't a specific proposal, just a framework, but it implies very aggressive policies).

There's also still the lingering effects of Trumpism. Many Republicans believe the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen, so they don't consider him the legitimate President. Many of them won't give Biden a favorable rating no matter what he does.

Biden quickly reversed many of Trump's environmental, diversity, and immigration policies. I'm sure this has rubbed many Trump supporters the wrong way, and reduced his favorability rating.

I'm a Massachusetts resident, and the fact that Gov. Baker is a Republican is hardly noticeable. Our population and legislature are overwhelmingly Democratic, so Baker has little ability to push the GOP agenda here. I think most of his vetoes get overridden (we allow line item vetoes in the budget, some of these are effective). So he doesn't do much that will impact his popularity among Democrats.

Answer 2

Different times. It used to be that while the two parties differed on how to get things done, they generally had the same goals. The Democrats and Republicans might argue fiercely on the best way to provide public education for example, but they both voted for things they thought would make education better. Both parties recognized that in order to legislate, both sides would have to negotiate and compromise. Sometimes your side did much better than the other one, sometimes not.

Then 2006 happened.

In 2006 the Democrats took control of the U.S. Congress for the first time since 1994. This meant that a lot of the Republicans that were used to compromising were kicked out of office. In 2009 after the Democrats also took control of the Executive branch, the Tea Party, a conservative political movement within the Republican party, rose with the intention of getting the party back in power with candidates that were further right than what had been there before. They were successful in 2010 following the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the new, younger Congresspeople were less willing to negotiate or compromise on anything. Their main method of legislating was to automatically oppose whatever President Obama supported. The Tea Party worked hard to push the Republican Party away from moderation and spent a lot of time and money to replace established politicians with newer, more conservative people.

This eventually led to the 2016 election, where even if Donald Trump had lost the primary election, the winner would still have been a hard right executive unwilling to meet Democrat priorities. This had the effect of seeing formerly moderate liberals get rebuffed over and over when it came to trying to meet in the middle and pass truly bipartisan bills. So what happened to the Republican party happened to the Democrats. More hard left individuals were elected and their supporters no longer want moderate stances or compromise because they don't see reciprocity from the Republicans.

Joe Biden is a product from an older, bygone era. He was necessary to win the general election away from Trump, but within his own party he isn't liberal enough to make the growing numbers of more extreme politicians and constituents happy.