What Obama and Trump Had That Biden Doesn't

His two predecessors had a fanatically devoted political base, but he doesn’t enjoy that same level of personal support.

Before I get to the heart of today’s newsletter, I want to share three things I’m watching in Russia’s war on Ukraine:

First, while most of the world has focused (understandably) on the fights for Kyiv and Kharkiv in northern Ukraine, Russia has been most successful in the south. It has reportedly captured the city of Kherson, and its continued success could mean that Russians might be able to attack Ukrainian forces holding the line in the Donbas region from the rear. Will Ukrainian forces retreat if faced with this crisis? Or will they stay and fight?

Second, in my Atlantic piece on Tuesday, I indicated that the Russian military was likely to turn increasingly to raw firepower and indiscriminate attacks to grind down Ukrainian opposition. Sadly, we’re seeing the signs of escalation, including reported attacks hitting “hospitals, schools, and critical infrastructure” in the south and the east. If Russia achieves any tangible battlefield gains with these tactics, expect them to proliferate across the battlefield.

Third, I’m frankly stunned at the sheer scale of the international economic sanctions against Russia. I did not expect the West to unite so swiftly and decisively. Now, here’s my question: Do the sanctions rally the Russian people against Vladimir Putin, or is there a chance they rally the Russian people against the West? We hope that Russians turn against Putin, but we shouldn’t assume they will, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that the Russian nation will endure and persevere through immense suffering when it is under attack.

Now on to the main subject—Joe Biden’s potentially permanent political weakness.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling methodology, Joe Biden’s approval rating is essentially tied with Donald Trump’s at the equivalent point in Trump’s presidency. And Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes. Throughout the entire eight years of Obama’s presidency, his approval rating was never as low as Biden’s is today.

By any reasonable political measure, Biden’s presidency is in trouble, Democrats face a challenging midterm, and there seems to be no clear path back to popularity. We can talk all day about the objective reasons for Biden’s plummeting approval—the retreat from Afghanistan was a bloody debacle, inflation is high, COVID surged in the winter, and there’s a land war in Europe—but I want to talk about something much more subjective, something that renders him more politically vulnerable than his predecessors.

To put it in crass terms, there is no political cult of Joe Biden. He doesn’t enjoy the same level of personal support as either Barack Obama or Donald Trump.

Obama and Trump were two fundamentally different politicians who shared something in common. They both had a fanatically devoted political base. Who can forget arenas and stadiums full of people chanting Obama’s name in 2008? I deployed to Iraq in 2007 and returned home in the closing days of the 2008 campaign, and I’d never seen anything like the raw emotion of an Obama rally. He moved people. I saw tears stream down their faces. I saw joy in their eyes.

Republicans mocked this fervor. A John McCain campaign commercial called Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world.” So there’s no small amount of irony in the fact that the next GOP nominee was one part real-estate mogul, one part reality-tv star, and one part lifestyle brand. And he filled his own arenas and his own stadiums. If I’d never seen anything like the Democrats’ devotion to Obama, I certainly hadn’t seen anything like the MAGA movement—including its flags, rallies, boat parades, conspiracy theories, and (ultimately) insurrection.

There are tangible and intangible benefits to this level of personal devotion. The tangible is obvious. You’ve got an unbreakable, relatively high floor of support. Look at both Obama’s and Trump’s FiveThirtyEight approval averages. After the first year, both men enjoyed remarkably stable ratings. No matter the domestic events—no matter the world events—they were not going to lose their base.

The intangible benefit is that this devoted base is a constant cultural presence. In homes, online, and on the airwaves, they’re spinning. They’re minimizing failures and hyping successes. Since part of their very sense of purpose and identity is rooted in their president, they can also be remarkably intolerant of dissent.

Joe Biden simply doesn’t have that same connection to Democrats. He isn’t a historic political figure like Obama. He isn’t a megawatt celebrity like Trump. And 2020’s socially distanced campaign robbed him of the ability to truly reach out to the grassroots. He won not because voters loved Joe Biden but because Trump mobilized both ends of the political spectrum, for and against his second term.

In some ways Biden’s own biography works against him. He comes from a small state. He’s been a political insider for decades. Before he was named Obama’s vice president, he’d never come close to mobilizing a national constituency. In fact, his bedrock Black support rests far more in the afterglow of the Obama presidency than it does in any independent, concrete connection with the Black community. They certainly didn’t rally to him in his two previous presidential campaigns.

While Trump’s unexpected victory over Clinton helped forge an unbreakable bond with the GOP base, Biden’s expected victory over Trump didn’t do the same with Democrats—in part because the election was far too close for comfort. The Democratic voters I know are far more grateful to Biden than devoted to him.

Culturally this is good news for the country. We need less personal devotion to politicians. Political fanaticism is dangerous. We need more objective evaluations of job performance. But what’s good for the country is bad news for Biden.

I don’t want to overstate Biden’s weakness. He’s president in an era of soaring negative partisanship. Millions of voters are primarily mobilized against the opposing party and will thus vote for their party’s nominee just to block the other side. And if Trump is the GOP nominee in 2024, the Democrats will have no trouble mobilizing the grassroots to try to block his return to the White House, regardless of whether Biden runs again.

But for now the political reality is clear. Biden defeated one political cult but did not replace it with another. And thus, as we face economic uncertainty and international instability, we don’t know how far his political fortunes may fall.