The Media Is All Wrong About Biden’s Poor Polling
The press is missing the most important fact.
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks at a news conference at the Filoli Estate on Nov. 15, 2023 in Woodside, Calif.
By Jack Shafer
12/20/2023 04:13 PM EST
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer. He has written commentary about the media industry and politics for decades and was previously a columnist for Reuters and Slate.
More flustered than Elmer Fudd in the closing seconds of a Looney Tunes episode, President Joe Biden summoned his inner circle late last month to explain why his poll numbers were so dismal — and to ask them what they were doing to boost them. The scene, captured by the Washington Post’s Tyler Pager and printed as the lead story in the paper’s Monday edition (“Biden Upset By His Low Polling,” Dec. 18), has Biden bellyaching that his economic successes have failed to move the dial, and notes that the president has been complaining about this for some time.
The great ignominy of Biden’s sagging popularity, writes Pager, is that his approval rating has tied his all-time low at 38 percent, pushing him into those regions of unfavor populated with telemarketers, health care managers and journalists. And as if that isn’t sufficiently debilitating, Biden laments that even the scoundrel Donald Trump is polling stronger.
In asking to be better loved, Biden is not alone. Every politician thinks he should be hailed by the people. In asking his people to make it so, Biden resembles the standard politician. What Biden overlooks — as does much of the press writing about Biden’s unpopularity — is that he was never a wildly popular figure nationally, so why should he be now? His instruction that the staff find a way to secure himself a place in the public’s heart is probably as doable at this point as unscrambling an egg.
more
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/20/media-biden-poor-polling-00132656
