Saturday subscribers-only thread: The vanishing link between Joe Biden's job approval and new covid-19 cases

Views about how the president has handled the virus are now fully baked in to his approval

Dear subscribers,

Happy Saturday — and let’s get straight into the newsletter.

For a good portion of the last year, I have seen people claim that there is a link between the number of new cases of covid-19 across the country and Joe Biden’s job approval rating. Some people have really committed themselves to this theory, arguing every time there’s a new wave of infections that Biden’s numbers will bump up once the number of new daily cases falls back down. The macro-story here, as I’ve read it, goes that people react negatively to worsening public-health conditions; that Biden gets less popular as waves of new cases swell and regains some ground as they fade.

The problem with this theory is that there is basically no evidence to support it. And there never really has been, either.

Take a look at the following two charts. This one shows the number of new (reported) cases of coronavirus in America since February 2020:

And this is Joe Biden’s job approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight:

Biden took office just around the peak of the first winter wave of covid-19 — roughly where the “7-day average” annotation is placed on the chart. That means, just by natural luck, that cases trended down for most of his first six months in office.

Looking at the graph of Biden’s ratings, however, you can see the immediate lack of evidence for any inverse link between the two series. Biden’s approval rating fell slightly (and disapproval rose sharply) for those first six months. And that’s while the situation with covid was improving!

This pattern repeated itself during the wave of new infections from the Delta variant in late summer and early fall 2021. Note the big increase in infections in late July, coming after the onset of a dip in Biden’s approval following the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan, and the falling off in September through October — which corresponded with further deterioration in Biden’s ratings.

And, finally, the Omicron wave came and went from late December 2021 through February 2022 with no major impact on Biden’s approval. Though it looks (from just eyeballing the graph) that there was about a percentage point of movement in the share of Americans who disapprove of the job he’s doing.

This all suggests that people aren’t factoring the situation with covid into their opinion about political leaders. That makes a good amount of sense. If we believe that minor fluctuations in policy about covid within administrations likely do not influence broader trends very much, Americans don’t seem to be blaming those macro-trends on presidents. Fair enough.

But the polling data also show Americans are less concerned about covid now than they have ever been. Only about 30% of people say they are “very” concerned about covid, according to polling conducted by Morning Consult:

And that is true for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents:

Now this is all clicking. It makes sense that if Americans are less concerned about covid now than before, then they wouldn’t be changing how they feel about the president because of new waves of infections. One hypothesis here is that a leader has to meet some minimal standard of competency to get points for public-health crises, and then he’s off the hook. Biden hasn’t majorly bungled anything recently, according to this theory, so his approval remains roughly stable. The flip side of this is that presidents don’t get a lot of credit when conditions improve.

Currently, there is a new wave of infections from the BA.2 variant spreading throughout Washington (where I live). I hope that this time, pundits won’t be claiming that Biden will get more popular as the situation improves. It’s misleading for readers. If people are going to do that, they could at least provide some evidence. Everything else seems to be little more than wishcasting.