WASHINGTON — President Biden enjoyed widespread acclaim among Americans in the early months of his presidency. Millions of vaccines were distributed across the United States. The White House called the high job growth as evidence of a recovering economy.
But privately, Biden’s top pollster has already sounded the alarm that even with the early successes, certain mounting threats could dwindle support for the president and his party.
“Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” John Anzalone and his team warned in a package of confidential polls, voter surveys and recommendations prepared for the White House. “Voters don’t feel like he has a plan to deal with the situation at the border, and it’s starting to take its toll.”
Within a month there was another clear warning. “Nearly nine in ten registered voters are also concerned about rising inflation,” said another DailyExpertNews memo.
The string of confidential poll data and weekly memos presented to Mr Biden’s inner circle from April last year to January this year provides a roadmap of the waning support of a president whose initial legislative proposals sparked comparisons with the New Deal of the Great Society.
Despite his pollster’s early warnings, Mr Biden and his top advisers have struggled to prevent either issue from becoming a major political problem. His economics team said inflation was temporary. Unrest among his immigration officials slowed down any serious action to tackle the border.
Despite the ambition of Biden’s domestic agenda, his pollster also warned him that most voters were not clear on his economic proposals. As of April last year, Mr Anzalone urged Mr Biden to do more to explain his plans to fund new government programs with new taxes for the rich. And last January, he wrote that “less than a fifth of voters say they’ve heard a lot about” his climate and social spending package.
With the congressional elections only months away, the poll memos highlight the biggest challenges for Biden and his party as they face the prospect of losing power to Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The correspondence was obtained in reporting for a forthcoming book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.”
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Mr Anzalone declined to comment. The documents were obtained from three individuals in the administration who had access to the poll data. They requested anonymity due to the confidential and sensitive nature of the documents.
“The president has focused on lowering costs for families and lowering the price of goods,” said David Kamin, the deputy director of the National Economic Council. It noted decisions to address “price pressures”, including forming a task force to address supply chain issues and releasing millions of barrels of oil from a strategic reserve to counter the economic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. to go.
Chris Meagher, a White House spokesman, said the administration had been “consistent in our efforts to secure our border and build a fair, orderly and humane immigration system.”
Biden has blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on high inflation, even though consumer prices were high before the attack, pointing to lower unemployment as evidence of a recovering economy amid the pandemic. The Department of Homeland Security last week released a plan for how the government would approach the border after lifting a Trump-era public health rule that allowed border agents to turn migrants away.
But those strategies have yet to resonate with voters, and the president’s own allies say that unless the administration can find a way to address the vulnerabilities outlined by its own team, Republicans will pick up momentum in November.
Just over half of Americans disapprove of Mr. Biden’s work, according to an average calculated by the data research website FiveThirtyEight. Inflation is at its 40-year high as the Fed considers raising interest rates. Moderate Democrats and Republicans join Mr Anzalone’s plea for a plan — more than a year later — to discourage illegal border crossings on the southwestern border.
“Democrats have a very important choice to make. That is, do you give in to the fear mongering that we know the right plays or promotes, or do you give a vision of hope and prosperity for the future?” said Quentin James, the chairman of the Collective PAC, an organization that promotes the election of African-American officials. “If we don’t, and we don’t offer a vision and a path forward, people will give in to what they hear on the other side.”
When Mr Anzalone warned last spring that “immigration is the only issue where the president’s assessments are worse with our goals than voters in general,” the Biden administration struggled to get thousands of migrant children out of border facilities and shelters. .
His administration had a plan to address the root causes of migration in Central America and establish an orderly, compassionate system at the border, the president said. “But it will take time,” Biden said during his first press conference as president.
Behind closed doors, his top aides spent all spring and summer debating how quickly to repeal Trump-era policies and what system to replace them with. In July, even as the government made progress in removing minors from border facilities, Mr Anzalone’s inquiry showed the issue was causing unrest among voters.
A memo on July 9 pointed to immigration and crime as two major weaknesses for Mr Biden.
“President Biden continues to hold weaker, negative reviews about two hot-button issues that have been bubbling up lately,” Mr Anzalone said.
Three days later, the president had a policing meeting with Eric Adams, who months later would win the New York City mayoral election by putting public safety at the heart of his campaign. Biden has also encouraged municipalities to invest millions of dollars in coronavirus stimulus funds into police forces — an initiative that is unlikely to have an immediate impact on violent crime.
But the pollster warned that while the president’s performance on the coronavirus and the economy remained strong, “violent crime has supplanted the coronavirus pandemic as the main crisis.”
Biden’s response to the pandemic kept voter support until summer, according to the memos, when the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the spread of the Delta variant hurt his general approval ratings.
The government was surprised by continued inflation, despite Mr. Anzalone, in part because the impact of the Delta variant on the economy had led to prolonged spending on certain goods rather than services, pushing prices up.
But the government insisted for months that inflation would be temporary, a message that failed to resonate with voters, according to the survey.
“The economy and inflation continue to dominate what voters are on — and their attitudes are getting worse, continuing to negatively affect the president’s job value on the economy,” one of the memos read. “And we should not expect a positive move in the short or medium term, as voters are not only gloomy about the economy and inflation now, but voters also feel that things are headed in the wrong direction going forward.”
Mr Anzalone’s memos also presented research into the proposals voters supported.
His company advised that describing infrastructure and social spending packages as a means of addressing supply chain problems, lowering the cost of drugs and taxing the wealthy would be popular with older voters.
Mr Biden appeared to be taking advantage of that research by making several speeches on how his agenda alleviated global deficits. His most recent budget proposal included a tax on billionaires to make sure the rich “pay their fair share.”