Is Joe Biden Good at Politics?
A successful midterms is not proof positive of political genius.
It’s become very fashionable in certain corners to say “Joe Biden is good at politics.” Usually it’s framed as a bit of counterintuitive wisdom — although, like most kinds of counterintuitive wisdom that catch on, it obviously flatters the most powerful and validates the status quo. But is it true?
I’m not going to conclusively answer that question here, but I think it’s worth running through the various data points. After all, it’s easy to pick out one unexpected victory or embarrassing loss and decide it tells the whole story. But we can look at the full set of evidence instead.
REASONS JOE BIDEN MAY BE GOOD AT POLITICS
He won the Democratic primary in 2020.
He won the 2020 election and was elected president. His popular vote margin, though not historic, was substantial.
He struck a genuinely bipartisan deal on infrastructure.
In the summer of 2022, he had a hot streak where he passed the Inflation Reduction Act, cancelled student debt, and generally achieved a startling run of policy success.
The 2022 midterms turned out far better than most expected, with Biden’s party picking up Senate seats and cutting losses in the House.
Biden still shows real sparks in good retail politics settings, and is clearly invigorated by the chance to go back and forth with the GOP, like he did in his strong State of the Union.
Biden’s initial 2024 ads are good, resonant stuff about the need to defend democracy, setting aside small-bore policy boilerplate for an emotional narrative about America under threat.
Okay, so, all-in-all, there’s some decent stuff in here. But it’s not all sunshine and roses, unfortunately.
REASONS JOE BIDEN MAY NOT BE GOOD AT POLITICS
He almost lost the Democratic primary after spending a year as a frontrunner. He bombed out in the first few contests, and was probably a few thousands votes of washing out altogether, when he found himself abruptly regarded as the main plausible alternative to a candidate who much of the party disliked, delivering him a bit of a miracle comeback.
He barely eked through the 2020 election, in electoral college terms. Despite COVID-19 and his opponent being Donald Trump, flipping about one-thirtieth of one percent of the votes could have reversed the election.
Also, does winning a primary and a general prove that a president is good at politics? Wouldn’t, by definition, any president have done the same? Does it follow that all presidents are per se “good at politics”?
He doesn’t appear popular. Biden has been deep underwater in approval polls, roughly comparable to Trump, for about a year and a half. Sometimes people say “That’s just how it is now, every president is unpopular,” but you didn’t hear the same defense of Trump. In fact, a lot of people looked at Trump’s polls and assumed he would probably lose reelection, and he did.
Common sense says he’s just not a very compelling speaker or public presence. While Biden’s got a certain avuncular charm, his age is deeply apparent, he seems deflated compared to his younger self, and speaking anecdotally, it’s pretty rare to find anyone who seems especially enthusiastic about him as a politician.
His policy achievements were not the result of some grand plan in the White House. The bipartisan infrastructure bill was a pretty marginal achievement, and popped into existence after recalcitrant moderates bullied Biden into splitting his agenda. Biden insisted he would not do that, and then caved. The Inflation Reduction Act was a true victory, but resurrected from the dead after a brutal year-long routine where Biden endlessly and ineffectively pleaded for Manchin’s vote, only to see Manchin up his demands. Manchin’s final change of heart only came after the process concluded, in an apparent bid, by Manchin, to stay at the center of attention.
It’s hard to directly pin the 2022 midterms on Biden, either. The GOP appears to have effectively won the popular vote, for the first time since 2014. Dems still lost the House. And if damage was limited, it seems largely attributable to a Dem base mobilized by Dobbs and by truly putrid, Trump-affiliated GOP Senate candidates. The White House, for its part, was initially reluctant to embrace abortion, and spent the final weeks before the election seemingly gripped by fear that it had embraced abortion too much, switching to a message about Medicare and Social Security cuts, presumably hosing off ads from a decade prior. I don’t think anyone, in retrospect, thinks this was the key to understanding the result.
I mean, you know who else had an incredible first midterm? George W. Bush. Was that guy good at politics?
Since the midterm, Biden has noticeably tacked to the right on policy. He’s gotten caught in a debt ceiling standoff deeply reminiscent of the 2011 standoff where Obama got rolled, and all public signals indicate Biden is drafting up serious concessions, too.
More broadly, Biden’s presidency has been defined by a caretaker ethos, where he has mostly avoided serious disasters, but done little to address the broader structural issues bearing down on US democracy, most of which bear the name “Donald Trump.” Addressing these issues would generally require norm-shaking, boat-rocking decisions (think: expanding the Supreme Court or circumventing the debt ceiling) and Biden appears either temperamentally opposed to those measures or uncertain of his ability to sell them, politically.
IN CONCLUSION
So is Joe Biden good at politics? Obviously that’s not a question with a firm answer. But in general I think the case that he is seems to rely on stacking up a bunch of high-level victories, and gets weaker the further you dig into why those victories happened. Yes, Biden became president — but with virtuosic campaigning, or via a chaotic primary? Yes, he is a startlingly successful domestic policy president — but did his actual policy agenda go according to plan? Yes, the midterms were a Democratic success — but does Biden deserve credit, or Samuel Alito?
In a lot of respects, I’d rather have a lucky Democratic president than a talented one. And Biden has been awfully lucky. The problem is, luck can run out. If Biden’s ever does, that’s when we’ll find out how good at all this he really is. I think it’s worth worrying about what happens if and when that day comes.