With the Democratic POTUS facing an approval rating of 33 percent, as registered by a recent Quinnipiac poll, the looming November midterms might have some unpleasant surprises in store for the Dems, such as loss of their slim control of Congress, said Penn on Fox News’ The Story.
While the Quinnipiac poll is on the lower end of recent polling, a FiveThirtyEight aggregate poll shows a Biden approval rating of 41.5 percent.
“These are spectacularly low [approval] numbers. To really get down to it, only a third being favourable and in the 20s on independents, of course makes [Biden's] re-election a virtual impossibility,” said the co-founder of the polling firm PSB Research.
According to Penn, the Biden administration “has got to pivot or this is going to be a tornado of a midterms if these numbers continue to hold up.”
The ex-pollster, who boasts a former client list including ex-President Bill Clinton, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Bill Gates, underscored that Joe Biden and his team have had months to do something to turn around on inflation, immigration, crime, Ukraine, and other outstanding issues, but that time has been squandered.
“…They just haven’t done it. They have done small little incremental changes. They need big changes to change some big numbers,” warned Penn.
Thus, Penn, said the administration has to “signal big changes” in energy and “OK some pipelines”.
“On immigration, they’ve got to close the border and signal they really want comprehensive immigration reform. Bring that back. Be a leader in that. On crime, they need to show that, look, if local DAs won't do the job, the feds will step in. They should back another 100,000 cops like we did in the Clinton administration. And in the Ukraine, be definitive, send the jets,” said Penn.
Joe Biden has faced plummeting approval ratings, which originally began to slide amid the COVID-19 pandemic and were further driven down by surging inflation and gas prices.
US inflation soared to a new four-decade high of 8.5 percent in March from the same period a year ago, according to the Labor Department. The surge has been driven by rising costs for food, gasoline, housing and other necessities.
Disruptions to global food and energy markets have accelerated amid the crisis in Ukraine. Russia launched a special operation to "demilitarise and de-Nazify" its neighbouring country on 24 February in response to a request for assistance from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), which had been enduring escalating attacks by Kiev authorities throughout an eight-year offensive. According to the Russian Defence Ministry, the operation only targets Ukraine's military infrastructure with high-precision weapons.
However, Washington, the European Union, and other Western partners such as Canada, Australia, and Japan have embarked upon a sweeping sanctions campaign against Moscow. President Biden signed an Executive Order to ban the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States.
The US and its NATO allies have also been funneling weapons supplies to Kiev. Some of the sanctions targeting the Kremlin have only served to backfire – as Moscow had warned they might, driving energy prices and inflation rates up. Thus, from February to March, inflation rose 1.2 percent in the biggest month-to-month jump since 2005, with gasoline prices driving over half of the increase.