Biden’s Disgraceful Exit from Afghanistan Is Still Hurting Democrats

I n the closing TV ad of her 2022 campaign, New Hampshire Democratic senator Maggie Hassan tries to distance herself from President Biden. While an incumbent Democrat trying to put room between herself and a deeply unpopular Democratic president isn’t surprising, what she focuses on is.

The very first piece of criticism of Biden that Hassan highlights is an issue that doesn’t get much attention in the media anymore: the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And during a debate last week with Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc, Hassan said she disagreed with Biden’s “decision to set an arbitrary deadline to withdraw” from Afghanistan and that she “supported an investigation to hold the administration accountable.”

There’s a strong case to be made that Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is one of only two actions he’s taken over the past year that badly damaged his approval rating — and thus badly damaged Democratic electoral prospects in 2022.

There has historically been a strong correlation between a president’s approval rating and how his party performs in a midterm election. As Henry Olsen notes at the Washington Post, “In the past four midterms, the president’s party received on average only one point above the president’s job approval rating in the national exit poll.” It’s possible that Democrats do surprisingly well and outrun Biden’s approval rating, but at 42.1 percent today, they have to outrun him by a lot to save their House majority.

When you look at Biden’s job-approval rating, it’s remarkable how quickly it flipped from positive to negative after the Afghanistan withdrawal, and how steady it has been since then. On August 15, the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban, Biden was polling at 50 percent approve and 43.8 percent disapprove. By the end of October, he had fallen to 43 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove.

It wasn’t the only factor, but Afghanistan was probably the biggest reason Biden’s numbers dropped 14 points on net in the fall of 2021. Americans were gripped by images of what it looks like in real time to lose a war — videos of Afghan civilians clinging to American aircraft before falling to their deaths; the betrayal of Americans and Afghan allies who were left stranded; and the terrorist attack that took the lives of 13 American troops. It was a shameful way to lose a war that 90 percent of the country thought necessary after 9/11.

And since that drop in the fall of 2021, Biden’s approval rating has been pretty consistently stuck in the 42 percent to 43 percent range, with the exception of this summer when disillusioned Democrats brought his approval rating down to 38 percent but came home following the passage of the Democrats’ climate and health-care bill (the inaptly titled “Inflation Reduction Act”). But that movement was more like a “dead-cat bounce” than a true recovery.

PHOTOS: Afghanistan Withdrawal

It’s true that inflation is the top issue on Americans’ minds, and inflation began to bite in the fall of 2021. That’s why Biden’s most damaging decision was to ignore Larry Summers’s inflation warnings about the $2 trillion stimulus bill that Democrats passed on a party-line vote at the end of the pandemic in March 2021 (when vaccines were widely available). But when you step back and look at his numbers, the Afghanistan withdrawal was the biggest catalyst for that drop in the polls in the fall of 2021 from which he has never recovered.

“Biden Is Betting Americans Will Forget About Afghanistan,” the Atlantic reported on August 20, 2021. The media may have forgotten about it, but Maggie Hassan’s final campaign ad is a pretty good indication that one year later the American people haven’t.