Joe Biden may regret putting a progressive agenda on the back burner

Joe Biden has been out on the road, with trips to Iowa and North Carolina within the last seven days and a stop in Oregon expected towards the end of this week. Voters will have heard plenty about what the president is doing to try to deal with inflation and the economy, and very little about the other policies concerning the Democratic Party base.

It is easy to see why. A recent High Point University poll in North Carolina gave the president some low approval ratings for his handling of inflation (19 per cent) and rising petrol prices (18 per cent), and for his stewardship of the economy in general (26 per cent). The picture nationally is not a whole lot better.

Biden needs to up those numbers, that is clear – particularly as the problems relating to these issues are not going away quickly – and any successes he is notching up in relation to the economy (on employment figures, for example) are not cutting through with voters in the same way. Blaming Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one thing, with Biden saying in Iowa: “I’m doing everything within my power, by executive orders, to bring down the prices and address the Putin price hike.” However, voters are only likely to accept that for so long.

What Biden has to be careful about is losing the support of parts of the Democratic base. While the White House has clearly decided that there is little chance of getting any more major legislation through Congress before the midterm elections in November (not least because of cagey relations within the Democratic Party itself), neglecting to draw attention to the more progressive elements of the president’s agenda – voting rights, immigration and so on – will bring its own issues.

Chris Cillizza of CNN pointed to some analysis by Gallup that looked at the attitudes of younger voters towards Biden across the length of his presidency. Before July 2021, he wrote, an “average of 6 in 10 adult members of Generation Z – those born between 1997 and 2004 – approved of the job Biden was doing. During the period spanning September 2021 to March 2022, that number had plummeted to an average of just 39 per cent”. The data showed a pretty similar drop among the older, “Millennial” group.

It should be pointed out that younger voters were more optimistic about Biden’s tenure than older voters when the president first entered the White House, so there was always scope for a drop – but Biden has to be careful. A significant number of those younger voters will have been persuaded by the idea of a progressive agenda, so putting these elements on the back burner for too long may cause him trouble at the ballot box later in the year.