A political analysis asks why Biden has high ratings on the pandemic. It makes no mention of any of Biden’s policies, decisions, actions or statements, because it turns out none of that matters whatsoever. Presumably there’s a point at which something would matter, but we are still waiting to prove that via example.
I think this is too cynical.
FiveThirtyEight is analyzing a bunch of existing polls. I expect that none of them asked questions more specific than overall assessment of how Biden was doing on COVID-19. If someone did do a poll asking more specific subquestions—does he do messaging better, do they credit him with beating his vaccine rollout target, etc—you’d probably see some details emerge.
(His messaging hasn’t been ideal, of course, but it’s raised the bar from the last guy. And his rollout speed was pretty good, but he also managed expectations smartly. Etc.)
Of course, the biggest reason that people rate him highly is just that, well, things are going Back To Normal and that means he’s doing a good job on it. That’s not a super sophisticated analysis on their part, but there are worse things for low-info voters to do than to support the ruling party when things go well and oppose it when things go badly, without trying to divine the causality.
I think this is too cynical.
FiveThirtyEight is analyzing a bunch of existing polls. I expect that none of them asked questions more specific than overall assessment of how Biden was doing on COVID-19. If someone did do a poll asking more specific subquestions—does he do messaging better, do they credit him with beating his vaccine rollout target, etc—you’d probably see some details emerge.
(His messaging hasn’t been ideal, of course, but it’s raised the bar from the last guy. And his rollout speed was pretty good, but he also managed expectations smartly. Etc.)
Of course, the biggest reason that people rate him highly is just that, well, things are going Back To Normal and that means he’s doing a good job on it. That’s not a super sophisticated analysis on their part, but there are worse things for low-info voters to do than to support the ruling party when things go well and oppose it when things go badly, without trying to divine the causality.