In the era of modern polling, no president has ever won reelection with a low approval rating

Joe

Biden at this point in his first term.

For obvious reasons, incumbents generally needed at least close to 50% approval on Election Day to win. And despite an improving economy, President Biden’s approval has remained stubbornly low, around 40% in the polling averages. It seems difficult to reach 50% in November.

Fortunately, for those who want Biden to win or who really just want Donald Trump to lose, that number doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

You may have noticed that many of the old political rules have passed their expiration date. They were not so much ironclad laws as rules of thumb. Still, it’s a bad time to rely on those rules of thumb.

“The long-standing maxim: As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”

for example, did not apply in 2020, when Trump carried the state but lost the election.

The still widespread belief that politics

is

that everything is about money and that donors have an outsized influence on elections has not been the case for some time. Just ask Michael Bloomberg or Ron DeSantis.

From 1888 to 1996, the electoral college result matched the popular result. That did not happen in 2000 and again in 2016.

For decades, successful presidential and congressional candidates followed the rule that you go to your party’s liberal or conservative base in the primaries and return to the center in the general election. Barack Obama largely ignored that rule, and Trump really ignored it, with no consequences. And most candidates for the House of Representatives and Senate are now ignoring that rule.

That’s because the electorate has gotten to the point where the real challenge to the incumbent usually lies with the primaries, not with the generals. As a result, candidates increasingly rely on building their base rather than convincing voters in the middle.

This points to one reason why approval ratings may not matter so much anymore. In a polarized electorate, most people are more likely to vote against the other party than for their own party.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Biden with a commanding 13-point lead among voters who dislike both candidates. If so, this could be all the president needs.

A second reason why these numbers may be unreliable: Trump is essentially acting as a sitting president. Normally, presidents who lose do not run for office again. And they certainly don’t claim that they didn’t actually lose.

Presidential Approval Ratings

to have

tend to be predictive because a re-election bid is a referendum on the incumbent party’s first term: Do voters want more of the same, or are they unhappy enough to choose a lesser-known and tested challenger? But voters already know what a Trump presidency would look like, or can at least be reminded of it with a barrage of negative ads.

Trump left office with an approval rating of 34%. This is why Nikki Haley tends to outperform Trump in hypothetical matchups with Biden: She is a change candidate in a way that Trump cannot be.

It is true that Trump is currently beating Biden in many hypothetical contests in battleground states. That should worry Democrats and anyone who doesn’t want Trump in the White House. But Trump’s positive ratings are similar to Biden’s. While Trump has always had a high support ceiling (about 34%), he also has a low ceiling, about 48%. Unlike Biden, Trump has never been really popular.

If even disaffected partisans come home reluctantly in the general election, essentially to vote against the other party, Biden will likely have a much larger pool of voters to rely on.

The expiration or at least temporary suspension of other political rules is also relevant. Republicans expected a red tsunami in the 2022 midterm elections, given Biden’s unpopularity and a struggling economy. But Democrats did shockingly well because they stood up against Trumpism and for abortion rights.

The old rule that the abortion issue helps Republicans was turned on its head after the Supreme Court ruled Roe vs. Wade had destroyed. The results of recent state initiatives in this area suggest that Biden could be carried to a second term only by abortion rights voters.

The president has already opened a huge gender gap with Trump. The abortion issue certainly explains a lot of it, despite the arguments to the contrary

Trump

for assaulting and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll and allegedly paying hush money to cover up an affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels likely contributed. Attacking Taylor Swift, as his most ardent supporters have done recently, won’t help.

All that said, if you believe a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the country, it still seems like a risky gamble to put a deeply unpopular incumbent president back in office on the suspicion that the old rules no longer apply. But the old rule of political parties making decisions based on what is best for them or the country has long since gone away.

@JonaDispatch