You figure there have to be better ways for White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon to spend her time than publicly attacking the Quinnipiac poll that gave President Biden a 33 percent approval rating, issuing a memo asserting the Quinnipiac result “is very likely an outlier.”
Biden’s approval rating is 42.3 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average, and 41.6 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. Maybe the Quinnipiac poll is an outlier. If it is, we’ll know pretty soon as more public polls come out. Or maybe the Quinnipiac poll was the first to detect Biden’s approval dropping from bad to really bad.
Biden’s problem is not that the Quinnipiac sample is stacked against him. Biden’s problem is that he’s in over his head. As FiveThirtyEight summarizes this morning, “broadly speaking, the public is dissatisfied. And it has been for a while now, too, as Biden’s approval rating has hovered in the low 40s for nearly three months, with roughly 42 percent of Americans currently approving of his job performance and 51 percent disapproving, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker.”
If the West Wing wants the president’s approval rating to get higher, they should worry less about the pollsters and worry more about generating better results.