With 18 Months To Go In 2024 Campaign, Biden’s Polls Are A Disaster

 There are still 553 days until Election Day 2024, but right now, things look pretty bleak for President Joe Biden.

Shortly after Biden announced his re-election campaign — not with a live event featuring thousands of cheering supporters but with a weird video posted on his website — his job approval rating among the U.S. public slipped to 37%, Gallup reports.

That’s just slightly more than 1 in 3 people — not a winning number. In the 2020 election, Biden won 51.3% of the vote, so that’s a 14.3% drop in support.

And for the record, 37% is the lowest Gallup has measured for him to date. The president’s job approval has been hovering in the low 40s for most of the last 18 months, after the initial honeymoon period. But he did drop to 38% last July, then his lowest.

The latest Gallup poll, taken April 3-25, shows a 3-point dip from March and a 5-point drop from February. His ninth quarter average in polling is 39.7%.

“Only Ronald Reagan in early 1983 had a lower ninth-quarter average among elected post-World War II presidents,” the pollsters wrote. “Reagan’s low ratings came during a period when the unemployment rate exceeded 10% after the 1981-1982 economic recession.”

For the record, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump had approval ratings slightly above Biden and Reagan at just over 40%. But all of them were far behind George H.W. Bush, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and George W. Bush, who averaged above 60% approval during their ninth quarter in office.

What’s worse, while the latest poll finds 83% of Democrats support Biden, but just 31% of independents back him. That ties the lowest reading to date among independents and shows a 9-point drop since February’s poll.

It’s the economy, stupid. Just 16% say the economy is “excellent” or “good,” 37% say it is “only fair,” and 47% say it is “poor” (up from 43% in March).

“The drop in Biden’s job approval corresponds with Americans’ worsening evaluations of the U.S. economy,” the pollsters wrote. “Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index for April is -44, down from -38 in March. It was last at this level in October.”

Meanwhile, another poll shows Americans think poorly of the federal government as a whole.

“More Americans continue to name government leadership than any other issue as the most important problem facing the country, with various aspects of U.S. leadership mentioned by 18% of adults in April,” the Gallup poll found. Fourteen percent cite the economy as the biggest problem, while the high cost of living and inflation came in third at 9%.

Even Democrats are getting bummed about the direction of the nation. Their overall satisfaction dropped 5 points since March to 29%. For independents, it’s even worse at just 16%.