To quote an old ad from John Houseman, Joe Biden got it the old-fashioned way — he earned it. In the FiveThirtyEight aggregate, Biden’s job approval has fallen to 38.6%, more than three points below Donald Trump at the same time of his presidency and far below other predecessors. In fact, Biden appears to be far below all of his predecessors:

Biden is dancing with a bleak bit of history: His approval rating of 39 percent1 is now the worst of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential approval data. In other words, Biden is arguably in worse shape than any other elected president heading into his first midterm election, including his four most recent predecessors, who, like Biden, were operating in an increasingly polarized political climate.

After entering office, most recent presidents see a decline in their approval ratings, but since Biden’s numbers peaked at 55 percent in March 2021, they have moved in only one direction: down. …

Why is Biden’s approval so low? For starters, Americans have a really dim view of how things are going in the U.S. For instance, about 75 percent believe the country is on the wrong track according to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, while only 18 percent say the country is moving in the right direction. To be sure, Americans have long held negative views about the direction the country is moving in — RCP’s average hasn’t been net positive once in the past 13 years — but this is still the highest level of dissatisfaction since 2011.

Many factors are driving this overall feeling of dissatisfaction among Americans, but inflation is arguably the biggest reason. Inflation, which is at its highest point since the early 1980s, has consistently ranked as the top issue Americans are worried about in our polling with Ipsos. In the most recent FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans told us that inflation or increasing prices was one of the most important issues facing the country, ranking far ahead of any other topic we asked about.

Another key point, one usually missed by analysts and even by pollsters, is Biden’s collapse in favorability as well as job approval. Even when Obama’s approval numbers turned net negative — which didn’t happen consistently until his second term — his favorability numbers remained solidly positive. People still liked Obama even when they didn’t approve of his policies.

Biden went into office reasonable well-liked too, but the avuncular act has utterly flopped since the fiasco in Afghanistan. Between his inauguration and the retreat/rout in mid-August, Biden didn’t have a single net-negative favorability poll result in the surveys tracked by RCP. After the end of Afghanistan, Biden has not had a single net-positive result on personal favorability, although he’s managed a few ties. Right now the RCP aggregate average on Biden’s personal favorability is 42.2/53.9, and the latest NYT/Siena poll puts it at 39/58.

Not only do a record level of voters disapprove of Biden’s performance, he’s also massively unpopular on a personal basis. And that makes it much more difficult for Biden to get off the canvas, and for Democrats to do so as well. The more he shouts and demagogues, the worse he will do on favorability, which will infect any attempts to rehabilitate his job approval. About the only thing that would solve both is for Biden to take firm, effective, and strategic action to address inflation and have that put a dent in its trajectory.

Instead, Biden and his team are insisting that inflation reports are overblown, that people aren’t really getting hurt by it, and/or that it’s all corporate greed, the fault of Vladimir Putin, or caused by Republicans that refuse to allow Biden to spend a few trillion dollars more on his progressive climate-change agenda. That is the product of Biden’s fantasy that his utter failure and collapse in voter confidence is simply a product of messaging rather than a rational evaluation of his incompetence.

Joe Biden has indeed achieved records in both job-approval and favorability collapses the old-fashioned way — by being a thoroughly incompetent crank. Democrats may hope to avoid accountability for foisting a thoroughly incompetent crank on the electorate, but that will take a lot more than a messaging strategy.

In case you don’t remember the Houseman ad, here it is. Which do you think voters have concluded with the Biden presidency? I’d guess that they think Biden and his team got a taste of the honey, but the rest of us got stung … if not outright screwed.