Will Biden's approval be in the low to mid 40s consistently after about a year?

[pbrower2a]

I think Biden will end up proving to be the converse of Trump: that is, just as Trump's ratings remained consistently stable with an approval rating in the low-to-mid 40s & a disapproval rating in the low-to-mid 50s, Biden's will also remain consistently stable, but with an approval rating in the low-to-mid 50s & a disapproval rating in the low-to-mid 40s. In fact, the (admittedly little) polling which we've already gotten on Biden's approval rating thus far is already ~10 points better than where Trump was 9 days into his presidency (which makes sense, given that he's obviously considerably less polarizing than Trump), so to some extent, this effect could very well already be showing up before our very eyes, though we'll obviously need months' more of approval polling to confirm whether or not this apparent trend might be sustainable.

For Trump... that is Trump, for which we have no analogue. Barely getting elected under flukish circumstances (Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote) implies that one must gain support with which to be re-elected. Trump picked up some raw vote, but not enough to stave off defeat. Trump did little to win over the votes of people who voted against him, and that shows in the bottom-scraping approval numbers. The raw vote that he did pick up he won on fear of losing the world that one knew (Commies! Muslims! the wrong sorts of Hispanics!) but that fell short.

At the very least, if - as is expected - the economy is well on its way to being (if not already) back & booming & life is well on its way to being (if not already) back to normal a year from now, then I see no reason to expect his having a consistent approval rating in the low-to-mid 40s at that time (other than SN's hackery perpetually clouding his judgment, of course).

The economy will go back to normal, but which normal? We are entering a new Skowronek cycle, one in which very different assumptions of economic reality prevail. The neoliberal ethos in which most people exist solely to make people already filthy rich even more filthy rich, that started with Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" and his supply-side, trickle-down economics, got Gingrich's "Contract with America" when Clinton tried to chip away at its inhuman assumptions and the Tea Party agenda when Obama tried to do much the same, and culminated in the Trump Presidency as the Presidential expression of Gingrich's Contract with America and the Tea Party attempted to transform America into a plutocratic dystopia, has collapsed.

Bad policies require personality cults and perverse ideologies to back them, and when those collapse, then people must start anew. If Reagan told people to stay the course when things were new and dicey, Trump sought to compel us to stay a failing course.