“Americans really don’t like this President,” writes Charles C. W. Cooke in the National Review. According “to a Quinnipiac poll released today, Biden’s national approval rating is 38 percent. Among independents, it’s 32 percent, with 60 percent disapproving of the job he’s doing. Biden is nine points underwater among Hispanics, he’s six points underwater among women, and he’s polling at only 66 percent among African-Americans…If Americans in 2021 are ‘united’ around anything, it’s that they disfavor Joe Biden.”
Ted Frank notes that Americans disapprove of Biden on immigration by “a startling 25-67 percent” margin. “Biden is underwater on immigration amongst Hispanics by 46 points, 23-69.”
Biden’s declining popularity may also reflect Americans’ belated recognition that Biden is not a “moderate” or “centrist.” That was obvious to policy analysts even before the election. Leftist publications gloated to their like-minded readers in 2020 that Biden’s policies were further to the left than past Democratic presidential nominees. But liberal newspapers with moderate and conservative readers claimed in 2020 that Biden was moderate, as a way of getting moderates and anti-Trump conservatives to vote for Biden.
Publications aimed at progressives admitted in 2020 that Biden was further to the left than past Democrats. As the progressive Peter Beinart put it in The Atlantic, “Despite embracing an agenda that is further to the left than that of any Democratic nominee in decades, [Biden has] avoided the specific policy proposals and catchphrases that Republicans find easiest to attack. As a result, he appears more centrist than he actually is.”
In 2020, Biden proposed vastly more spending than any past Democratic nominee. He supported $3 trillion in new taxes, and $11 trillion in new spending, according to Reason Magazine, which endorsed neither Biden nor Trump. That was much less centrist than Hillary Clinton, who supported only $1.4 trillion in new spending in 2016, or Barack Obama, who falsely claimed in 2008 that he would implement a “net spending cut.”
Biden’s other stances were also decidedly not moderate. As Newsweek notes, “Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he was in favor of paying slavery reparations to African Americans and Native Americans if studies found direct cash payments to be a viable option.” No past Democratic presidential nominee had ever supported reparations, which could massively increase the national debt and shrink the economy. Joe Biden supported California’s AB5, which curbed freelance work and wiped out the livelihoods of thousands of independent contractors. He wants to implement it nationally. No past Democratic president had supported such legislation.
Joe Biden supports the BE HEARD Act, which would subject even the smallest employers to lawsuits seeking unlimited punitive damages, liability to lawyers who sue them, the possibility of being sued over years-old allegations, and a definition of “harassment” that requires them to restrict speech even outside the workplace. Obama never supported anything like that.
Biden backed tens of billions of dollars in new government spending on racial preferences and set-asides, which the current Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, views as constitutionally suspect. Courts struck down Biden’s racial set-asides for COVID relief. But a future, more progressive Supreme Court would likely uphold such set-asides, as a more liberal Supreme Court did in the past.
Biden supported giving states a financial incentive to reduce prison populations, which could increase the crime rate over what it would otherwise be.
Yet, liberal newspapers with moderate readers did their best to conceal the radical changes sought by Joe Biden. He was depicted in the progressive Washington Post, which has never endorsed a Republican for president, as being “moderate.” The Post used ersatz “conservatives” to make this claim, such as the author of its supposedly conservative “Right Turn” column. That “conservative” writer was actually an angry progressive: She supported “massive spending increases,” “expressed rage” at pro-lifers, opposed repealing ObamaCare, denounced proposals to cut welfare, and celebrated spending increases that raised the budget deficit to over $1 trillion.
