Afghanistan is not going to sink Biden’s presidency — but the pandemic could – By Ammanda Marcotte (Salon) / Aug 26 2021
Biden’s pandemic grace period is over: Democrats are in trouble without a lot more vaccine mandates
Let’s be clear about one thing up front: The resurgence of COVID-19 — there are now over 100,000 hospitalizations for the first time since January — is not President Joe Biden’s fault. He is the victim of Republican sabotage. The blame primarily belongs to Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for encouraging their audiences to eschew vaccination. It belongs to Republican politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who keep getting in the way of serious efforts to get people vaccinated. The blame lays with Facebook, for choosing profits over aggressively fighting COVID-19 disinformation on their platform. The blame lays with everyday Republicans, who are so consumed by bitterness that they are willing to draw out this pandemic, using their own bodies, just to stick it to Biden and take away the freedoms of the vaccinated Americans who voted for him. But above all else, the blame should be pinned on Donald Trump, who made it a station of the right-wing cross to deny that COVID-19 is a serious threat and now can’t even get his own people to listen to his pleas to vaccinate.
Polling up until now has shown that most Americans do, in fact, blame these saboteurs instead of Biden. However, there are some troubling indicators that Biden’s grace period is starting to wind down.
The president’s average approval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight, started to slip below 50% for the first time in his presidency halfway through August and has now dropped to 47.5%. To be sure, that’s higher than what Trump enjoyed but it is low enough that Democrats should really start worrying about depressed voter turnout in the 2022 midterms.
