Young people dislike President Joe Biden.
Biden has a 41% approval rating with 18- to 29-year-olds, according to a Harvard University poll released last week. It’s an 18-point drop from the same time last year, when 59% of them approved of him.
Given the job that Biden has done in the White House, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Ineffective is the best word to describe the Biden administration. The country faces rising inflation outpacing wage growth. It’s becoming more expensive for people to make ends meet. Rents are rising, homes are becoming more expensive, grocery store bills are rising, and the Biden administration is light on legislative accomplishments.
The Federal Reserve deserves much of the blame over inflation, but what has Biden done to ease the problem? He hasn’t done what he said he would do if elected.
Biden said he wanted to raise the federal minimum wage. That has remained unchanged since 2009 at $7.25 an hour. Under the Biden administration, the purchasing power of that minimum wage has declined further due to high inflation. And even though many Republican senators have expressed interest in raising the wage, the Biden administration, which says it supports a $15 hourly wage, hasn’t worked across the aisle to etch out a deal that could receive bipartisan support.
Even getting to work is far more expensive under the Biden administration. The average price for a gallon of regular gas in the country was $4.194 per gallon on Monday this week, according to AAA. Prices show no sign of improving — they were virtually the same one month ago ($4.20).
Meanwhile, diesel is up to $5.32 per gallon, a more than 20-cent increase from this time last year, making shipping goods more expensive.
And what has Biden done to combat the exorbitant cost of higher education? Biden made the student loan debt problem worse when he voted for the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. This made private student loans one of 10 types of debt exempt from forgiveness when filing for bankruptcy. Fixing that mistake could have bipartisan support, as would preventing states from revoking work licenses when people default on loans. And yet, Biden may give blanket forgiveness without changing the broken higher education system.
Not to mention, the Biden administration’s lack of pragmatism has led to the Build Back Better agenda stalling. The administration pushed for it for months despite knowing that at least two Senate Democrats didn’t support it. Biden could have broken up and watered down the bill to pass pieces of it with bipartisan support instead of trying to blow out spending on a bunch of unrelated matters.
This doesn’t mean that Republicans will dominate with younger voters this November. However, Democrats tend to do better with younger voters, so this is a problem for them. If these voters don’t support the Biden agenda, they may be less likely to vote this November. A midterm election already favors the opposition party, so this makes the problem even worse for Democrats.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
