Joe Biden's Polling Woes Could Get Even Worse As Shutdown Looms

Joe Biden's approval among voters could suffer even more as a result of a potential government shutdown if "they blame the person who's unpopular" as his administration struggles to sell his economic agenda to the electorate, a political scientist has said.

A Washington Post/ABC poll released on Saturday gave the president's likely 2024 rival Donald Trump a 10 percent lead, with the incumbent seeing just a 30-percent approval rating on the economy among the 1,006 U.S. adults asked between September 15-20.

While the authors of the poll cautioned that it was likely an outlier—other recent national surveys putting the gap between Trump and Biden at around a single percent either way—it comes as the president is facing a consistently low job-approval rating since entering office.

Alex Waddan, an associate professor in politics at the University of Leicester, in the U.K., told Newsweek that it was likely Biden's relative unpopularity that could hamper him making political hay out of a shutdown that appears to be fueled by divisions among Republicans in the House of Representatives.

"The Clinton and the Obama administrations were very skillful at playing off against Republican Congresses in those previous shutdowns," he said. "I'm not sure the Biden administration would be as confident that they'd be able to make political capital out of a shutdown at the moment."

Another constraining factor for the Biden administration compared to past government shutdowns under Democratic presidents is the make-up of Congress: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama faced an entirely GOP-led Congress when they occurred in 1995-96 and 2013, respectively.

"There was discernible, identifiable blame in what was the cause, and Congress took more blame from the public than the president did," Waddan explained. "It's a little bit more complex this time because, in both those cases, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, whereas now you've got split control."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is currently negotiating with Democrats on a budget deal that would keep the government running come the end of the month, suggesting he is keen to avoid a shutdown.

But the Republican leader—who has had a testing relationship with the conservative wing of his party—has faced overt threats to be removed and may struggle to get wholesale approval for any agreement. Waddan, among others, have suggested the recent announcement of an impeachment inquiry was an attempt to "buy off" hard-line GOP members.

Commenting on how this likely looming closure of non-essential federal works could reflect in voter sentiments, the political scientist said there would be a "blame game" between the two major parties as to who is responsible.

"I don't think anything will get to Biden's desk because the Senate and the House won't come up with either a continuing resolution to keep funding things as they are or anything bigger than that," he added. "So it won't be a question of Biden vetoing anything, because I don't think anything will get to his desk.

"In that sense, he'll be able to have some sort of plausible deniability that it's his fault, but that's for the people in Washington [D.C.] rather than the wider public."

The latest polling aggregate gives Biden an overall approval rating of 41 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.6 percent—slightly worse than Obama and Clinton's at the same stage in their first term.

However, disapproval of his handling of the economy is far worse, at 64 percent, according to the Post/ABC poll, while his response to the migration crisis at the southern border has 62 percent disapproving. An Associated Press survey in August similarly gave him 36 percent approval on the economy.

This is despite the president spending much of the summer touting his so-called Bidenomics, signposting the 13 million jobs created under his watch and unemployment dropping to less than 4 percent.

But Waddan suggested that Biden's dismal response from voters on his economic agenda was because of inflation hanging over Americans from the coronavirus pandemic, which only recently began falling to more acceptable levels. In August, inflation was at 3.7 percent, down from 8.2 percent in September 2022.

"Inflation is a simple explanation of why Biden's economic numbers are so bad, because [his] other economic indicators are pretty decent," he said. "But inflation hurts everybody—everybody understands it, everybody notices it, everybody's impacted every day."

Waddan said that the economy could become something the Biden administration could convincingly "boast about" come the election next November if inflation remained down and voters began to see the effects, but that it was "quite a stretch in terms of a switch in the polling over 12 months."

"It just needs to stay low for a while and for people's wages to catch up," he said. "It's not rocket science in that sense—people just feel poorer."

Government shutdowns no longer affect essential workers, meaning a long-term impact on the economy is unlikely—although some analysts disagree. The 2013 shutdown caused a $2-6 billion loss of output from an economy valued at the time at around a trillion dollars.

But given the president's recent bout of poor polling, "the shutdown seems unlikely to help Biden's economic numbers," Waddan said, though "it's possible Republicans could end up getting more blamed than the administration does."

Even if Republicans are left worst off by the shutdown, it may not help Biden in his likely 2024 face-off with Trump.

"Trump seems to be able to distance himself from Republicans at times, in terms of Washington politics, so even if Republicans get the blame for the shutdown, Trump might be able to disassociate himself from that," Waddan said.

When asked to comment, a White House spokesperson said: "Americans have been through a lot in the last two years—from a once-in-a-century pandemic to Russia's unprovoked war on Ukraine, which caused inflation to spike around the world—but Bidenomics is working."

They said that "while the press is focused on polls and sensationalist headlines, President Biden is focused on delivering for the American people," adding: "The midterms and recent special elections showed Americans favor the President's vision for growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up over trickle-down MAGAnomics."

The White House spokesperson also noted polling conducted on behalf of Newsweek in July, which found 47 percent of Americans support Bidenomics, compared to just 20 percent who opposed his economic plans.

Update 09/26/23, 10:55 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a White House spokesperson.