Tonight, President Biden will deliver his farewell address from the Oval Office. In addition to thanking the American people for granting him the privilege of serving as their president, Biden will likely once again extol his long list of accomplishments.

I want to take this occasion of Biden’s address to try to answer one of the enduring questions of the Biden era.

Why didn’t the public give Biden credit for all of his impressive legislative accomplishments?

In his first two years in office, Biden passed: a major bill to rescue the economy from COVID, a bipartisan law to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, the first gun-safety law in decades, the largest climate investment in history, a law to lower the price of prescription drugs, as well as bills to help veterans and spur the semiconductor industry.

By any measure, it’s an impressive list. Biden’s aides compare him to LBJ and FDR. Every set of White House talking points that I have received used the term “historic” to describe this presidency. That word is clearly how Biden and his aides see their accomplishments. But the public does not agree. Biden’s approval rating has been underwater since August of 2021 and he will exit the presidency with an approval below 40% and only a bit higher than Trump’s after January 6th.

By any objective measure, Biden passed a very impressive agenda. Polling shows that the public approves of individual pieces of that agenda. The fact that voters never cared nor gave Biden credit has been a subject of immense frustration for Democrats. Understanding America’s disappointment can tell us a lot about how politics has changed in recent years and what we need to do differently if, god willing, we ever get back into power. There is no simple, singular answer, but I want to run through the various theories and explanations to see what rings true.

1. Is It the Media’s Fault?

Is the ignorance and nonchalance about Biden’s historic record the media's fault? This is an article of faith among Biden’s most ardent fans. Under this theory, the New York Times and others failed to cover Biden’s many legislative feats and their positive impact on society and trumpeted bad news for clicks and ratings.

This is one of those instances when we need to hold two independent thoughts in our head simultaneously. The media failed to educate the public about Biden’s accomplishments. They spent much more time on the bad news than the good news. This is not a new phenomenon. The media has long held a bias for conflict and controversy — a bad habit put into overdrive by the perverse incentives of social media platforms. However, evidence shows that media consumption does not correlate with dissatisfaction with Biden. In fact, the opposite is true. The more someone consumes traditional media sources that did a bad job covering Biden, the more they like Biden. Check out these numbers from an NBC News poll before Biden dropped out of the race:

Similarly, post-election polling shows that support for Trump was inversely correlated to the media. It’s hard to blame the media for Biden’s problems when the people who consume the most media were the most likely to approve of Biden and support Harris.

The larger media environment is complex, siloed, and chaotic. It is almost impossible to reach a large segment of the population, but that’s a different critique than blaming the New York Times and CNN from talking too much about inflation and not enough about the Inflation Reduction Act.

2. Did Biden Address the Right Problems?

Democratic policy community members have been despondent since the election. Biden did so much good and yet got no credit. The operating theory of politics is that you get elected, do a bunch of popular, impactful stuff, and then get rewarded with political support and eventual reelection. If you believe — as I do — that Biden passed a series of very important bills, then the policy-feedback loop might be broken. Are voters no longer rewarding politicians for what they have done?

Well, it’s complicated. While Biden’s legislative successes, particularly around climate and infrastructure, are historically significant, they ultimately did not address voters’ most immediate concern — the rising cost of gas, groceries, and housing. Naming the climate/healthcare bill the “Inflation Reduction Act” was a (perhaps too) clever branding exercise; the provisions did not address how most voters thought of inflation. Costs kept rising in the year or two after the bill's passage. In defense of the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats, there are no levers that the government can pull to lower costs. There isn’t some bill they could pass that would immediately bring down the cost of eggs and milk.

If your house is on fire and instead of putting it out, I fix your leaky toilet, how happy are you going to be with me?

3. Did Voters Feel the Impact?

The second challenge for the Biden Administration is that, while the bills they passed will be very impactful over time, very little of that impact has been felt. Some consumers already benefit from lower-cost prescriptions, but it’s still only a fraction of the public. Money has been allocated to build new roads, bridges, airports, and semiconductor plants, but none have been built yet. Some of this is just the reality of how long it takes to complete complex, large-scale projects, but some of it is also a product of overly-convoluted policymaking. As Josh Barro wrote in his Very Serious newsletter:

The 2021 infrastructure bill allocated $42 billion for rural broadband expansion, but it hasn’t actually produced any rural broadband expansion yet, in large part because the Biden administration added a zillion strings to the funding that have made it difficult to come up with plans about how states will actually spend the money — climate goals, union set-asides, price regulation, “equity.” Maybe, in 2025, states will actually start taking the money and laying fiber. But since that’s still a theoretical proposition, is it any wonder that rural voters did not reward Democrats for the investment in rural broadband that hasn’t actually happened?

At a time of historic distrust in government, voters will not give credit for things that may happen in the future.

4. Did Biden Fail to Sell His Accomplishments?

After passing the American Rescue Plan earlier in his tenure, Biden’s aides went on a media tour telling everyone within earshot that they had learned the “lessons of 2009” and would not repeat Barack Obama’s mistake of not sufficiently selling his accomplishments. I am incontrovertibly biased on this matter, but what happened in 2009 is more complicated than the Biden aides and others suggested. Without revisiting ancient history, Biden needed to undertake an aggressive effort to make sure people knew the benefits of his legislative accomplishments (For those who are interested in ancient history, I wrote up my thoughts on this matter back in 2021).

It’s a brutal media environment and breaking through to the public has never been harder. However, Biden was our least public-facing President in decades. He did fewer interviews, press conferences, and events than his predecessors. At the outset, Biden’s efforts were constrained by COVID. But his relatively passive media approach continued long after the White House abandoned its strict COVID precautions.

Most politicians’ understanding of the media is frozen in amber from the time they reach prominence. Biden's sense of media predates the internet. The President is old school. He thinks the work should be enough. It’s part of his appeal. However, communicating is a big part of the job. He was unwilling or unable to do what it took to garner attention in this era. As years went on and Biden’s ability to communicate diminished, the President was out there selling his agenda even less frequently.

There’s a whole separate question about Biden’s messaging, which was often backward-looking and overly defensive. Voters rarely heard or saw Biden. He was absent from the scene. I’m not sure that a more aggressive, strategic communications effort would have made a difference, but we will never know.

There is no easy answer to why Biden failed to get credit. But we cannot repeat the past the next time Democrats are in power (God-willing).

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