Historically, a newly elected president's party consistently loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections two years after the general. The average loss in the House - where every seat is up for reelection every two years - has been 25 seats since 1946, or an average of 37 for unpopular presidents, according to Gallup.
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Even the generic ballot, which has proven to be the most reliable predictor of a party's performance in the midterm elections, doesn't tend to resemble the eventual results until a few months out from the election, as Nathaniel Rakich wrote last week in a FiveThirtyEight polling analysis.
Presidential approval has not had the same predictive weight to it when it comes to the midterms compared to a full presidential election, though there remains a loose correlation between the two.
In continuing surveys like Gallup and NPR/Marist, Biden's approval has not budged that much with Democrats and Republicans. His biggest issue has been hemorrhaging support among independents for months.
Pollsters that ask about his handling of the pandemic have found a slide in that metric among independents, which tends to mirror his overall job approval rating with the same group.
In January, 61% of independent voters told Gallup they approved of Biden's job performance. The latest poll has him all the way down to 37% among them.
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With the Afghanistan withdrawal on top of that, Biden's approval has reverted to Obama and Trump-era levels of polarization.
The Gallup summary of the latest poll put it bluntly.
"Biden's latest approval rating further cements the fact that the honeymoon phase of his presidency is behind him," Gallup's Megan Brenan writes. "Political independents, who were part of the coalition that helped him defeat Trump in 2020, now largely disapprove of the job he is doing as president."
However, after what has already been a topsy turvy year and-a-half since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be plenty more exogenous events that happen between now and Nov. 2022.
How Biden handles those and how he gets the country out of the Delta variant - along with whatever else the virus has in store for humanity - will weigh much more significantly among the public than his summer of 2021.
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