President Joe Biden’s average approval rating is well below the historic threshold for the incumbent to win reelection.
RealClearPolitic’s average of Biden’s approval rating stands at 40.3 percent, while 56.3 percent disapprove of the president.
His approval rating is lower than the three previous presidents’ ratings in March during the fourth year of their first terms: Trump 44.3, Obama 47.5, Bush 50.1:
This chart shows the job approval on March 20 in the fourth year of the presidencies of Biden, Trump, Obama, and Bush (RealClearPolitics).
Biden’s 40 percent approval rating is well below the 50 percent threshold incumbents historically require to win reelection. Gallup reported several key reelection indicators:
- 50 percent or higher approval ratings renders Biden a safe bet for reelection
- Two presidents with approval ratings below 40 percent lost reelection
- Between June and Election Day, approval ratings do not change much
This chart shows the presidential job approval ratings of incumbents seeking reelection (Gallup).
The dynamics of American politics are currently under realignment, upending the standard Democrat coalition from the 1960s, polling trends show. Democrat inroads specifically with black, Latino, and Asian voters deteriorated to the lowest point in 60 years. In turn, Hispanic and black men could vote for former President Donald Trump in proportions not seen in American politics since the 1950s.
“In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest,” Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch explained on X. “The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities.”
Trump appears to spur the realignment, forcing the Republican Party to identify with working-class taxpayers instead of woke big businesses, Patrick Ruffini, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, wrote:
Trump upended the traditional party alignment in 2016 with a cultural appeal to white working class voters that simultaneously repulsed the denizens of America’s upper-income, college-educated suburbs. This continued in 2020, when Trump’s working class coalition was joined by millions of nonwhite voters, while Democrats continued to count more of the college educated in their ranks.
The political realignment appears to be showing up in 2024 swing state polling. Trump leads or is tied with Biden in six of the eight 2024 swing states, state polling shows.
“They don’t feel safe with this lunatic,” Trump recently said about Biden and the realignment in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News. “He’s a terrible president. He’s the worst president in history. … I believe they want security.”
“We have, I believe, 15 million more people in here,” Trump continued. “Many of them came out of jails, prisons, and many of them came out of mental institutions, and — as I say it in the speeches — insane asylums. You have many terrorists coming into our country. We’re going to pay a big price for this.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
