Joe Biden can’t risk looking out of touch when it comes to the cost of living squeeze

Despite a very positive March jobs report, the president’s poll numbers are slipping again, writes Chris Stevenson

Joe Biden has to make sure he has an answer that voters will accept (AP)

I wrote at the start of last month about an uptick in Joe Biden’s approval numbers, and over the weekend this was posted on the president’s Twitter feed: “In March, the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 per cent, down from 6.4 per cent when I took office about 15 months ago – the fastest decline in unemployment to start a president’s term ever recorded.” A tone of triumph, no?

However, things haven’t actually worked out like that. Biden’s poll bump lasted until about mid-March, and now he is back to familiar territory, bouncing around a 40 per cent approval rating. The latest average of polls from Real Clear Politics has 40.8 per cent of Americans approving of the job Biden is doing, against 54 per cent who disapprove.

This is despite the very positive jobs report that the White House was touting in the tweet mentioned above. While growth was lower than economists expected in March, it marked the 15th month in a row of gains. The US economy is now just 1.6 million jobs, or around 1 per cent, short of where it was in February 2020. The problem Biden faces – as do many other leaders around the world, including Boris Johnson – is that rising inflation, combined with the added pressures that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is bringing to bear on the energy market, is hitting people hard.

Polls have repeatedly shown that US voters care about the economy more than anything else, with inflation named as the most urgent issue facing America in a recent Quinnipac University survey. With petrol prices affecting drivers, and the cost of food shopping increasing, voters are being hit in the pocket. Biden’s White House knows this, with the president authorising the release of 180 million barrels of oil from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, equivalent to one million barrels a day for the next six months. In another tweet, Biden acknowledged that “gas[oline] prices are painful”.

But the White House can’t wave a magic wand and alleviate the problems immediately – with the same being true of other governments around the world. Calls will come for more to be done, though, and Biden has to make sure he has an answer that voters will accept. Blaming Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine will only provide a short-term solution, and the president can’t afford to look out of touch with the needs of voters if he keeps highlighting the jobs figures, or other successes, while people feel a cost of living squeeze.