The Real Reason Biden’s Political Wins Don’t Register With Voters
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Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the public consciousness?
Political insiders point the finger at Biden. He isn’t a great communicator, they say. He tends to defer and give other people credit. He doesn’t have enough energy. But part of it is also how voters consume political news.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and Elaina Plott Calabro, a politics writer at The Atlantic, about what political news is—or isn’t—breaking through, and the gap between what voters say they want and what they actually seem to want.
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.
Not speaking as a partisan here, just an observer of human nature, there is something I can’t understand about the Biden administration. They have objectively, objectively, pulled off some pretty huge things: an enormous and complicated vaccine rollout, the biggest investment in infrastructure in over 50 years, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years.
These are moves which are impressive and historic and helpful to many, many Americans, and yet, poll after poll shows that when people are asked about these accomplishments, they’re surprised. They’ve never heard of them. They’re annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just shrug, like Who cares?
Why? Why don’t these legitimate wins penetrate the public consciousness?
Now, there are inside, political consultant-type answers, which point the finger at Biden and his style of governing, just as there are insider-type answers to what happened in the House this week, when a tiny group of Republican extremists ousted the Speaker of the House.
Something is going wrong with them, the politicians. But I suspect it’s more complicated than that.
And what I’m wondering more about is us, the voters: what we’ve become accustomed to, what we’re maybe encouraging, what we are and aren’t paying attention to, what we say we want versus what we actually want.
