Can we finally admit that approval rating polling is inaccurate and that Joe Biden is indeed popular?
Democrats largely ran toward Biden (not away from him) in the midterms, and massively over performed. It’s de facto proof that Biden is far more popular than his approval rating suggested, and that approval rating polls have simply become as inaccurate as all other polls.
We all need to stop repeating and accepting the narrative that “Biden is unpopular” and we need to convince the mainstream media to stop saying it as well. These midterms proved his approval rating poll numbers are simply gibberish and not to be presumed true.
When Biden’s approval rating numbers took a massive tumble throughout the second half of 2021 and never recovered, it always felt odd. Pollsters insisted it was because of the Afghanistan withdrawal. But while that clearly did piss some people off, most (not all) of them were anti-Biden already. And even as Biden and his party pulled off accomplishments throughout 2022, Biden’s approval rating mysteriously never did recover. But beyond a gut feeling, we never did have evidence that the approval rating polling might simply be inaccurate – until now.
In hindsight, it feels like approval rating pollsters decided that the Afghanistan withdrawal was crushing Biden’s popularity, and baked it into their methodologies by oversampling people who fit the narrow description of having gone from pro-Biden to anti-Biden over Afghanistan. Biden never actually became less popular; the pollsters just became less accurate at measuring Biden’s popularity. Given how questionable poll numbers have become in general of late, there’s no reason to presume that approval rating polling is in any way accurate. It’s just that until now we didn’t have an election to confirm that Biden couldn’t possibly have an approval rating as low as 40%.
So let’s stop ceding ground on this. Let’s stop accepting the notion that Joe Biden is unpopular, and let’s start pushing back against others who claim Biden is unpopular. The only reason most Americans think Biden is unpopular is because the entire mainstream media spends every day insisting that he’s unpopular. Let’s find a way to pressure the media into acknowledging that the midterm elections prove Biden is indeed a rather popular President.
