| The story of President Biden's first year in office is largely defined by how bad his polling has gotten. Let's take a look at where he's getting hit and why. Biden is struggling with partisanship: Biden's approval ratings aren't that different from Donald Trump's. It's normal now for a majority of the country to disapprove of the president, driven by near-universal dislike by the party out of power and independents who don't give the president much grace. This phenomenon probably has a lot of contributing factors, but one glaring one is Americans' declining trust in government. But Pew Research finds Democrats have become less supportive of Biden, too. Over the past six months, Biden's job rating among Democrats has fallen 20 points. That's as most Americans think Biden is likable but not a strong leader, according to new Gallup polling. Biden is struggling with expectations: When pollsters measure whether Americans think Biden is performing better, at or below their expectations, he performs worse than any other president in the 21st century, notes The Post's Aaron Blake. That is probably a reflection of how 2020 was such a big change election. Voters chose the antithesis of Trump, a president promising competence over all the chaos. And yet from the Afghanistan withdrawal, to the coronavirus still raging, to the economy, to Republican resistance to getting vaccinated, to Democrats' infighting, Biden's first year has been chaotic for reasons within and beyond his control. It's all about the economy right now: Inflation and the economy are voters' top concerns by a lot. And they don't think Biden's doing a good job: A recent NBC News poll found 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy. Fox News (and yes, they do legitimate polls) found that voters give Republicans a big advantage over Democrats on perceptions of their ability to deal with the economy. This is a tense subject for Biden. On Monday, he cursed at a reporter who asked him about it. We can see why he's frustrated. The mainstream economic consensus is that inflation is the necessary byproduct of the economy's recovery from the pandemic, and there's not a lot he can do about that. But it matters. CBS found that a majority of Americans said their opinions of Biden would improve if inflation eases. That's largely out of Biden's hands, but it does give him and his party some hope that he can turn such bad polling around. Trump's revealing comment on why he wants voting restrictions  (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News) | One Republican-led election policy that has stood out as particularly partisan is the effort to limit drop boxes. As voting by mail has increased, Republican- and Democratic-led states have used drop boxes for years with common-sense security measures and no major problems. Yet after Trump's loss, some GOP-led states have declared war on these boxes, limiting their availability. Trump is leading that battle. His reasoning is revealing: He thinks it will allow more people to vote, and he assumes that will help Democrats: "Drop boxes are only good for Democrats and cheating, not good for Republicans," he said in a statement Monday. That's not true on the cheating front or the Democrats-winning front. - Republican-led states have mail voting and use drop boxes, and the GOP opposition to them now doesn't make much sense. "They just are not a partisan issue," said Lori Augino, a former nonpartisan election official who leads the vote-by-mail organization Vote at Home. "A ballot drop box is just about ensuring voters have every opportunity to participate, and they have been wildly popular."
- It's far from a guarantee that higher turnout benefits Democrats. Republicans did great in 2020, a record turnout election, and Republicans I talk to hope more people — not less — vote in this November's midterm elections to help them take back Congress.
As Republicans continue to try to restrict how people can vote, Trump is out there cheering him on so his side can win. Why don't Republicans support voting rights legislation? Last week, voting rights legislation failed in Congress amid Republican objections to the bill. A frequent reader question I get is: Why are Republicans opposed to changes such as making Election Day a holiday, standardizing early voting and generally expanding people's access to the polls? Republicans say it's because they think states should determine how to run their own elections. Left unsaid is that the way things are has been working just fine for Republicans — they can win statehouses, Congress and the White House without having to win a majority of votes. Why would they change that now? | 
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