President Joe Biden has become so toxic to voters that swing-state Democrats don’t want to be seen with him in public. It’s yet another sign of just how badly the 2022 midterm elections are shaping up for the Democratic Party.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is running to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey, and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, will both skip Biden’s event in their state on Friday. Both of them just happen to have scheduling conflicts and therefore cannot meet with the national leader of their party, who won their state just last year.
It’s no surprise. Biden is far more unpopular now than he was when he took 50% of the vote in Pennsylvania. Nationally, his approval rating has hit its lowest point in both the RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight polling averages. In Pennsylvania, Biden went from 44% approval in a June poll from Franklin & Marshall College to an alarming 32% in October.
This isn’t the first time “scheduling conflicts” led to swing-state Democrats dodging Biden appearances. Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia and has made “voting rights” her battle cry, skipped Biden’s speech in the state. Biden used that speech to push Democratic voting bills in Congress and compare opponents of those bills to Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Jefferson Davis. This was Biden’s big speech for Abrams’s pet issue, in a state Biden had won in 2020, but she couldn’t find time for it.
Biden’s approval rating in Georgia, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, is 17 points underwater, with 34% approving and 51% disapproving. Abrams is trailing both Gov. Brian Kemp and his Republican primary challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, but her numbers are still not as horrible as Biden’s approval numbers.
Fetterman, Shapiro, and Abrams might have incompetent schedulers, but it’s far more likely that they see the writing on the wall. Biden is tremendously unpopular and will be an anchor around the necks of Democrats all across the country — better to have something pop up elsewhere on the schedule than to appear with a deeply unpopular president who has no hope of turning the ship around.
