Ed took a skeptical view of this idea yesterday. I’m a bit more credulous, but only a bit. A president’s job approval is the political equivalent of gravity; his party can’t escape it for long.

Particularly when it’s as terrible as Biden’s is. That’s more like a black hole, sucking in everything around it. Picture purple-district Dems screaming into the void as they circle the eye and then disappear into the center of it, into electoral oblivion.

Still, there are hopeful liberals who insist that a “decoupling” is under way between Biden’s gruesome approval rating on the one hand and Dems’ midterm fortunes on the other. A president sitting in the mid- to high 30s should guarantee his party’s obliteration at the polls this fall — and probably will. But it may be that progressives’ intense efforts to scapegoat Biden for Democratic paralysis in the aftermath of Roe being overturned is paying an unexpected divided for them. By treating him as a sort of heat sink for lefty frustrations over abortion, his critics are making it safer for angry liberals to turn out and support the party downballot.

Per Jonathan Last, Dem analyst Joe Trippi believes “decoupling” was already in motion before Dobbs.

The House elections are the most purely generalized races—the places where you expect the environment to be reflected most accurately, without the distortions caused by candidate quality. To the extent that these midterms are about Biden, that will be bad for Democrats.

But the consistent theme of Republican candidates not just being crazy, but being crazy along the same vector—the three above, plus RonJon, Mastriano, Lake, et al—is creating a dynamic which is slowly decoupling voters views of Biden from their sense of what 2022 is about.

That decoupling was already happening before Dobbs; the SCOTUS decision accelerated it. The Dobbs decision also seems to have energized Democratic voters, whose intensity as measured in polling has rebounded noticeably. So even the fundamental environment has shifted.

True or false? Well, compare the trend line in RCP’s average of Biden’s job approval…

…to the trend in the Dems’ polling on the generic ballot:

For most of the year Biden’s approval bounced around between 40 and 42 percent but then began to slide at the start of June before dipping sharply later that month, right around the time Dobbs was decided. Democrats’ generic ballot has also been mostly stable this year between 42 and 44 percent, and also slid sharply during June — but then spiked sharply immediately after Dobbs was handed down. The fortunes of Biden and congressional Dems, typically closely linked, have suddenly diverged in the aftermath of Roe’s demise, in other words. Which does sound like decoupling.

There’s further evidence in the fact that some Democratic candidates downballot are running ahead of Biden in their states. Far, far ahead.

New GA poll shows Warnock running a rather remarkable 16 points ahead of Biden approval, reaching 50% and leading. One of clearest examples yet this year could see more voter decoupling than usual from views about the president https://t.co/v38yaDlKXF

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) July 14, 2022

Biden’s approval in Georgia is 34 percent. It’s shocking that Raphael Warnock is competitive, let alone leading, in an environment like that. He’s not the only purple-state Dem to pull that trick either: Gretchen Whitmer is ahead of all five of her potential GOP challengers in Michigan by at least nine points in a new poll from the Detroit News. Normally watching a president’s base give up on him is a portent of electoral doom but in 2022 it might be evidence of compartmentalization by liberals motivated by seeing Roe overturned. Some Dems who were otherwise inclined to stay home in November may have decided that they can’t do that now that abortion rights are on the ballot. What they can do instead to signal their displeasure at the status quo is to say “Biden sucks” to any pollster who’ll listen.

Some prognosticators have even begun to wonder whether the red tsunami expected this fall might end up as a modest red wave. Nathan Gonzales:

If you tally all the races rated as Solid Republican, Likely Republican, Lean Republican and Tilt Republican, and split the 18 Toss-up races evenly, Republicans would have 221 seats. That would be a net gain of seven seats. They need a net gain of only four for the majority.

Of course, Republicans wouldn’t turn that down, but it would be a minuscule gain and a massive disappointment for the GOP because the expectations and current projections are high…

Many of the limited polls in individual races show Democratic candidates outperforming Biden’s job rating by a significant margin. For now, voters appear to be making a distinction between their disapproval of the president and their congressional vote. That makes it difficult to “bury” Democratic incumbents in the ratings — rate them as underdogs more than three months before Election Day — when they are running ahead of their GOP challengers.

Trippi guesstimates that Republicans will net between a mere 10 and 20 House seats. Is that due entirely to Democratic “decoupling”?

Of course not. Much of it has to do with poor candidate selection by GOP primary voters. Part of the reason Warnock is running 16 points ahead of Biden in Georgia is because Georgia swing voters are realizing that Herschel Walker is a pure celebrity candidate who often seems not to know what he’s talking about. Whitmer also lucked out in Michigan when her most formidable Republican challengers were tossed off the ballot due to signature fraud on the petitions they used to submit their candidacies. It may be, in other words, that swing voters are disinclined to support Warnock and Whitmer due to their unhappiness with Biden’s first two years. It’s just that they’re a little more disinclined to support the underwhelming Republican alternatives.

Redistricting is a factor too. The reason Gonzales sees so few seats flipping is partly because there are many more deep blue districts now than there were 10 years ago. The more heavily gerrymandered the country is, the bigger the wave has to be to flip dozens of districts. Republicans have a tall order.

But yeah, it may also be that the end of Roe has driven a sense of genuine “decoupling” among some Dem voters. They were never in love with Biden, he served his purpose in defeating Trump, he’s probably not going to run again, and he’s certainly not going to channel their antipathy towards the right the way, say, Gavin Newsom does. They may have struck a tacit bargain with themselves of late in which they’re done with the president but still eager to teach Republicans a lesson at the polls. If so, the end of Roe might be the only issue that was capable of creating that dynamic.