I was reading a story about President Joe Biden’s poll numbers the other day, and this quote from a lifelong Democrat hit me like a pie in the face.
“I love Joe Biden. He’s great, you know, but he’s an old dude and I am really frustrated with our lack of choices and wish I could just run away.”
The woman, Andrea Singmaster of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had been directly helped by policies Biden started, but she was unhappy he was running again. She is far from the only one. As of this writing, Biden’s disapproval rate sits at an average of 55 percent. Respondents cite his age, the economy, and other factors.
There are certainly plenty of legitimate grievances with America in general and Biden in particular, but some of those word choices of Singmaster’s tell a story beyond the strictly political. I’ve heard similar phrases from people in my orbit. Folks hope that someone will challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination and give them “something different.” People who were energized in 2020 to defeat former President Donald Trump are drained by the reality of actual governing a country that is still weighted with that fallout.
If you’ve ever hung around with severely depressed people, you’ll recognize these mindsets. “I just want something different” is what a person in a mental spiral says when they are so unhappy that even picking something to eat seems like an impossible, meaningless choice. It’s a cry for help that says literally anything must be better than the current circumstances.
I’ve been around a fair few people in those states, and you know what happens the vast majority of times? They order a meal they end up hating out of sheer desperation for change. Then they’re miserable again, maybe even more so. It’s that uncomfortable comfort zone that depressives fall into. The entropy of that state is hellishly strong.
It’s tempting to dismiss these people as unrealistic idealists that thought Biden could wave a magic wand and make the fascism disappear. As I’ve said before, America has a bad problem wishing for elected kings, but the emotional crisis goes deeper than thwarted optimism.
On one hand, Biden has accomplished a startling amount of good for a modern president in a heavily polarized era when the opposition controls the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. Those accomplishments are popular. His work with negotiated Medicare prices polls at 82 percent. Capping insulin prices is even higher.
Two-thirds of Americans want more done to combat climate change, and Biden has made an enormous amount of progress on that front. One of my other gigs is writing for an environmental group that focuses on ways that the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden’s Justice40 Initiative tackle everything from solar power to racial environmental justice. There are projects going up all over the country, led by community leaders and backed by federal money. Yet, I talk to friends whose number one issue is the environment and all they see are the failures. Something might as well be nothing.
I get it. The trauma of the rise of fascism and then COVID on top of that has done some irreparable damage to the public’s ability to hope. I would frankly not trust anyone who wasn’t a little depressed right now. As a person who suffers some pretty severe depressive episodes, I’ll be the first to tell you that looking through a list of all my accomplishments does little to raise me up. There’s a reason you hear about veterans committing suicide while wearing their medals.
Likewise, I don’t think “Bidenomics” is going to lift the president’s poll numbers. At this point, those polls are no longer an indication of anything Biden is actually doing. They’re a symptom of social malaise that is felt bone deep.
Trump is a figure the left can fear and fight and be angry about. Biden, though, is a walking avatar of America’s failure. He is every person who couldn’t get medical coverage, pay their student loan bill, watched as an oil company poisoned a neighborhood, or lost friends and family to extremism. Biden is the American left in microcosm; a lot of good intentions that make only tiny, incremental improvements amidst cruel opposition.
Maybe in a better time, more people could recognize the measurable life improvements helped by Biden’s actual actions. We’re not in that time. Instead, the left is hurt and sad and feeling powerless. I don’t think polls are measuring how good or bad a job Biden is doing. They’re measuring how bleak the electorate feels.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
