President Biden’s ranking in the polls is poor and is causing panic among many Democrats and a whole host of theories about what is wrong.

He’s too conservative, progressives say; too liberal, according to centrists.

And of course almost everyone mentions their age.

But what if all that misses the real story? What if the biggest problem Biden faces isn’t Biden at all?

Biden is 81. Not a question that is politically problematic. But if age were the sole determinant of reputation in the polls, what would explain the position of 51-year-old Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? His current approval rating of 31%, according to Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, makes Biden’s 38% in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of the polls look almost dismal.

You could argue that Trudeau is a special case: he recently began his ninth year in office and may no longer be welcome.

But if so, what can be said about British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? He has been in office for barely a year and according to the latest Ipsos survey, only 21% of Britons are satisfied with the work he does. The opposition Labor party leads Sunak’s Conservatives 41%-24% in a hypothetical look at the next British election, which Sunak must call by January 2025.

Perhaps Sunak’s problem is that his party has run out of steam after 13 years in power under five prime ministers. But that would not explain the problems of the German Olaf Scholz. The governing coalition of his Social Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Free Democrats took power only two years ago. Only 17% of Germans agree with the way they are doing it, according to a new poll by the German public broadcaster.

Scholz is obviously suffering from the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which has put pressure on his coalition and pushed up prices in Germany. But that doesn’t explain the poor standing of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose popularity fell to a new low of 17% this week.

I could go on, but the point should be clear by now: Around the world, leaders of wealthy, developed countries are struggling with poor approval ratings. Each has individual factors cited that are often cited to explain their problems: age, long tenure, disagreements over domestic policy, a financial scandal in Japan. These factors are all real and have an impact.

But look at the overall pattern and it’s hard not to conclude that something bigger is at work.

A similar pattern emerges when we look at the approval ratings of presidents over the past seventy years.

Beginning with President Eisenhower and continuing through President George HW Bush, American leaders for forty years spent most of their terms in office with an approval rating above 50%. The periods when the number of presidents fell below 50% corresponded with major national traumas, the escalation of the Vietnam War in the last few years of President Johnson’s term, the Watergate scandal for President Nixon, and the Iranian hostage crisis for President Carter.

The last two decades since President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004 have shown a mirror image: aside from brief periods, including honeymoons early in their terms, none of the presidents since have been above 50% for any length of time. President Trump never received majority approval during his four years in office; Biden was above 50% for the first few months, but quickly fell below that.

As with the international comparison, one can point to individual reasons why each president has failed to gain majority support, but the persistent pattern suggests a broader explanation.

The possible explanation is no secret: Presidents like Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval during a period of sustained and widely shared economic growth that raised the living standards of most Americans. Not long after sustained growth gave way to income stagnation and rising inequality, comfortable presidential approval ratings became a thing of the past.

Globally, middle-income countries have seen large increases in living standards in recent decades, and abject poverty around the world has fallen sharply, but average living standards have remained at a plateau in many wealthy countries.

Income stagnation is not the only problem facing rich countries. The high level of immigration has brought enormous benefits and dynamism, but has also increased social tensions. Countries like Japan, which oppose immigration, have suffered from the rapid aging of their populations as birth rates fell. Changing gender roles and cultural diversity have led to greater equality and backlash.

These factors have contributed to a sharp decline in the belief that political leaders stand up for the interests of average citizens.

Trust in government in the US has fallen as the share of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track has risen, and party political lines have hardened. All of this leads to lower job approval for presidents.

Added to this is the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I recently wrote, many Americans have tried to put the pandemic behind them and have stopped talking about it. But the trauma it caused worldwide will not go away so easily: we remain a society in recovery.

The fact that Biden shares his unpopularity with other leaders does not make his problems any less real. However, the comparison with others should make people a little more skeptical about the belief that another Democrat would do significantly better. If the underlying reality in all these countries is that unhappy voters are punishing the party in power, replacing Biden with another face won’t necessarily solve anything.

Nevertheless, Biden faces serious problems, as figures from a new survey from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center show.

The Pews poll found that only a third of Americans approved of Biden’s performance, with 64% disapproving. His standing has fallen significantly since the start of the year, especially among his fellow Democrats: Biden’s approval within his party has fallen from 73% at the end of last year to just 61% now, Pew found.

In particular, unrest on the left over the war between Israel and Hamas has received a lot of attention, but the Pew numbers suggest this is not the main source of Biden’s problems. Among Democrats who describe themselves as liberal, 66% approve of his performance; of those who identify as moderate or conservative, 57% do so.

Former President Obama suffered a similar, albeit less profound, decline in support among his fellow Democrats at this point in his presidency. He managed to win over Democrats, in part by portraying his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, as a plutocrat unsympathetic to the problems of ordinary Americans.

White House aides have made no secret of their plan to try to do the same by pointing out Trump’s faults to voters, and the former president has a knack for reminding voters what they don’t like about him. Once he’s in the spotlight more consistently, it will likely make a difference.

But Biden and his allies should not count on the incumbent power itself achieving a victory: today it is no longer clear that it is even an advantage.