Why Democrats doubt Afghan exit will hurt ‘resolute’ Biden at the midterms

Mr Biden’s approval rating dropped seven points to 46 percent after the Taliban conquered the nation but his party isn’t worried, writes Eric Garcia

(AFP via Getty Images)

The downfall of Afghanistan has led President Joe Biden into his most precarious political position yet, but it is still unclear whether this will spell bad news for the president’s party in the coming months.

A Reuters Ipsos poll conducted Monday this week showed Mr Biden’s approval rating dropped by seven points to 46 percent after the Taliban conquered the nation, which sent the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani into exile and Americans saw images of Afghans clinging to a plane as it took off. That was down from 53 percent from Friday.

Mr Biden has said he stands firmly behind his decision and the same poll showed that seven in ten Democratic and six in ten Republican voters said the chaos in Afghanistan was proof the US should leave the country, while at the same time, 51 percent of people surveyed said they wanted to send troops back to fight the Taliban.

Lis Smith, a Democratic consultant who was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, said there is a huge disconnect between how Washington views Afghanistan versus most voters.

“The reality is that most voters - both Democratic and Republican - are sick of open ended military engagements and much more concerned with what’s happening at home than abroad,” she said.

Conversely, another poll conducted this week from Politico and Morning Consult found that support for leaving Afghanistan collapsed. In April, 69 percent of voters supported all ground troops withdrawing from the country, but in a new poll conducted from 13 August to 16 August, just 49 percent did.

Most notably, support for the withdrawal did not just drop among Republicans, whose support for withdrawal went down 21 points, but also among Democrats, where support dropped by 15 points, while support among independents declined by 25 points.

Former president Donald Trump has battered Mr Biden in a barrage of statements, releasing 12 in five days attacking the current president.

“Perhaps in World history, there has never been a withdrawal operation that has been handled so disastrously,” Mr Trump said in a statement Tuesday morning. “A President who has been illegitimately elected has brought great shame, in many ways, to our Country!”

This came despite the fact that Mr Trump signed the initial deal with the Taliban that ignited the current plan to withdraw and approved the release of 400 “hardcore” Taliban prisoners. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee scrubbed a webpage celebrating Mr Trump’s “historic” deal with the Islamist group that now runs Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Sen Rick Scott of Florida who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the main campaign arm to elect Republicans to the Senate, said it was time to exercise provisions of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to remove Mr Biden from office. Though this is highly unlikely and would also require approval from his would-be successor Vice President Kamala Harris and a majority in Congress, where Democrats control both Houses.

James Zogby, who is the co-manager of Zogby Research who worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Republicans will use Afghanistan as a cudgel, despite the fact he thinks they would not have done better.

“Will voters remember? Probably not, but Republicans are going to make sure they do remember,” he said.

(AFP via Getty Images)

At the same time, plenty of Democrats in Congress are also demanding answers. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks announced Tuesday that there would be a hearing with Secretaries of State and Defense Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, respectively, on the debacle.

“The situation in Afghanistan is rapidly changing and it is imperative that the administration provide the American people and Congress transparency about its Afghanistan strategy,” he said in a statement.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations.

“The wholly inadequate agreement the Trump administration made with the Taliban did not get commitments for the Taliban to break ties with Al Qaeda, nor did it account for the day after our withdrawal,” he said in a statement. “In implementing this flawed plan, I am disappointed that the Biden administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal. We are now witnessing the horrifying results of many years of policy and intelligence failures.”

At the same time, Democrats are not sure it will damage them in the long run. Karin Johanson, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee when Democrats took back the House in 2006, said the situation in Afghanistan was different from when the party won back the House from Republicans in response to the devolving situation in the War in Iraq.

“Things were going badly in Iraq and we won in large part because of that,” Johanson told The Independent. “It was being bungled.”

As a result, she said that it is still too early to tell the political ramifications.

“All of this judgment that this is politically bad for the president is based on evidence,” she said. “I don’t know where this conclusion that this has political ramifications comes from.”

Rather, she noted how it is possible for the American people to hold two emotions at once.

“One, the heartbreak of what is happening and the resolve that this was what needed to happen,” she said. “The fact that the president has been resolute has been to his benefit.”

Similarly, Arizona Rep Ruben Gallego tweeted Monday that most people stopped caring about Afghanistan.

“If a war is not felt across all spectrums of society then you cant expect all spectrums of society to care,” he tweeted.