Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the public consciousness?
Political insiders point the finger at Biden. He isn’t a great communicator, they say. He tends to defer and give other people credit. He doesn’t have enough energy. But part of it is also how voters consume political news.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and Elaina Plott Calabro, a politics writer at The Atlantic, about what political news is—or isn’t—breaking through, and the gap between what voters say they want and what they actually seem to want.
Listen to the conversation here:
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.
Not speaking as a partisan here, just an observer of human nature, there is something I can’t understand about the Biden administration. They have objectively, objectively, pulled off some pretty huge things: an enormous and complicated vaccine rollout, the biggest investment in infrastructure in over 50 years, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years.
These are moves which are impressive and historic and helpful to many, many Americans, and yet, poll after poll shows that when people are asked about these accomplishments, they’re surprised. They’ve never heard of them. They’re annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just shrug, like Who cares?
Why? Why don’t these legitimate wins penetrate the public consciousness?
Now, there are inside, political consultant-type answers, which point the finger at Biden and his style of governing, just as there are insider-type answers to what happened in the House this week, when a tiny group of Republican extremists ousted the Speaker of the House.
Something is going wrong with them, the politicians. But I suspect it’s more complicated than that.
And what I’m wondering more about is us, the voters: what we’ve become accustomed to, what we’re maybe encouraging, what we are and aren’t paying attention to, what we say we want versus what we actually want. What part of it is them, and what part is us?
Recently at a live show, I ran these questions by The Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer, who just wrote a book called The Last Politician about Joe Biden, and Elaina Plott Calabro, who writes about politics for The Atlantic and who has asked a lot of experienced pollsters questions like this: What’s the problem? Why don’t voters know about these big successes?
Elaina Plott Calabro: I think it’s not natural for someone like President Biden to try and go out and focus on shaping the narrative that way. At the end of the day you’ll talk to pollsters who say I go in and say, Did you know that this administration kind of executed the largest investment in infrastructure, really since the Eisenhower era? When they do bring this up with voters and focus groups, they’re almost angry that they haven’t heard about it.
Rosin: What do you mean, they’re angry?
Plott Calabro: Why didn’t I know about this? Why didn’t this break through the media for me? And it’s interesting because reporters do cover these things, but that, I think is, kind of a dynamic that’s become really pronounced in the Trump era. What does it mean to achieve ubiquity as a politician when you are not Donald Trump? And when has that become the standard for how one breaks through?
Rosin: Why aren’t they pleased? Like, why isn’t it a Oh, this is wonderful.
Plott Calabro: I think it’s more of just, I feel that I should have known about this. Why is this not something I’m seeing on TV every day? Or that when I just, like, log on to the homepage of whatever news source I use is the banner of the day?
Rosin: So, I feel unsatisfied in understanding why they’re not breaking through the public consciousness. Is it because they are not great communicators? Is it because—maybe what I’m asking, is the problem them or us?
Franklin Foer: Yeah, well, I think, as a nation we’re suffering through some sort of equivalent of a long COVID, where even though the pandemic is gone, there’s a lot that still feels bad about its aftermath. Whether it’s inflation, which is something that you’re reminded of constantly, and whether the administration contributed to it in a somewhat meaningful way or an extremely meaningful way, it’s there and people are pissed off about that.
Like, when was the right moment to crow about the vaccine? Like, was it while people were getting vaccinated, but there were different variants that continued to rage across the country? Was it after we returned to normal? Returning to normal wasn’t something. I read The Plague by Camus, and there was actually a fireworks display at the end of that pandemic when the quarantine was lifted. They tried that fireworks display on July 4, 2021, and they got lashed roundly for that. So I think there’s something about the times that we’re living in. And then I do think that there is something about his age that ends up compounding this impression that he’s not governing in a competent sort of way. So when you read my book, you would see that he’s a micromanager. He’s involved in a lot of decision making, but the public impression is that he’s not an energetic president. Is that persuasive?
Rosin: That’s almost persuasive, but I think my fear is that we don’t have tolerance to take in good news. Like, our senses are heightened to conflict in such a way now that we can’t even hear anything that’s below the decibel of that. And so if he were to somehow say, Look I’ve accomplished, I’ve done this great thing. I’ve, you know, done this with inflation. I’ve done this with vaccines, it just comes in as noise, you know, dull noise.
Plott Calabro: I would say Celinda Lake, who’s a pretty prominent Democratic pollster, has done a lot of work for the Biden campaign. She put it to me pretty succinctly, which was that when you understand that people feel day to day, like the vibes are off in the country, they don’t want to see their politicians taking a victory lap, even if it’s deservedly so, for example. When it’s not matching, sort of, their day-to-day experience in the country, it just—it’s a recipe for disaster. Like fireworks not going so well for instance.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Plott Calabro: I think that’s something important to think about. But the second thing that’s interesting about whether voters today have the capacity to, I don’t know, register good news or even seek it out, you know, on their own—that’s, I think, something that Democrats are confused by too, because, you know, Biden was swept in ostensibly on this idea that voters want a return to normalcy.
They want to get back to a place where they’re not actively, like, wondering what their president is saying or doing every day. In some ways, that is what this president has been able to provide, but even if voters were saying back in 2020, That is the dynamic we want, it’s not the one that seems to compel them day to day in terms of, like, wanting to be engaged with what is happening.
Rosin: So this is one of those cases, I can’t remember the psychological, sociological term for when there’s a gap between what you say you want in a poll and what you actually want, and you’re not even aware of that, your desire, because it’s subconscious. So you’re like, Check. I want to go back to normal. But it’s not actually….
Okay, so we have 12 months until the election or so. I’ve heard the term—a lot of people say we’re sleepwalking into the same election, but I think that’s not true. Like, I think that many things are very different than they were four years ago. So let’s start with Trump. What’s different, Elaina, about Donald Trump now? Who’s the Donald Trump now versus the Donald Trump we knew last time?
Plott Calabro: The Donald Trump who ran in the last election was someone who felt he was playing with house money, right? And I think that was a large part of his appeal. There was no plan necessarily for what to do once he got in office, because not even he actually expected for that to ever happen.
There is a degree, I think, of seriousness to the bid this time to where, you know, you might recall, Hanna, the very popular and overused phrase back in 2016, which was “Take him seriously but not literally.” I think we’ve arrived at a point where Donald Trump has shown voters enough of himself, and consistently, that you can no longer just say, Don’t take him at his word.
Especially after January 6, we are far, far past that. So if he is saying something to rile up a crowd, I don’t think that there is the same degree of suspension of disbelief maybe there was in 2016—and perhaps never should have been—that he is very serious about what he wants to do.
And I think when it comes to his very nakedly authoritarian tendencies, that is what gives this election, I think, like, a much darker tenor and, like, starker shape than the one that we saw.
Foer: You know the other slogan or the other catchphrase is one that Paul Krugman came up with, which was, “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” And so I think that there is a chance that it could be malevolence tempered by less incompetence heading into this campaign. And I’m so fascinated by the fact that he’s managed to go many months without overexposing himself to the public.
I think that part of the reason why the poll numbers are where they are is that people have forgotten the malevolence of Donald Trump. And when he wages his equivalent of a basement campaign, which seems like it runs against everything, every fiber of his being to be quiet, that’s interesting.
And then you’ll get the abortion issue and the way that he’s trying to pivot to the center against the other Republicans who are running against him, he’s made this calculation, This nomination is mine. I need to start running a general-election campaign. That’s a shockingly competent move. And then I think when it relates to the authoritarianism that Elaina’s just describing, you see all of these plans that are in the works, that think tanks are ginning up in order to remake the civil service, to eliminate the swaths of the deep state that he abhors, that seems much more competent than the last go around.
Rosin: What is the…I feel like the Republicans are starting to coalesce around a line about Biden. Like, they’re hitting on a line about Biden. What? What is that? And how did they come to that?
Foer: It does feel like they’ve successfully constructed a character. He’s “sleepy Joe Biden.” He’s this guy who slurs his words and can’t complete a sentence.
There’s almost a conspiratorial edge to it that he’s just a sorry corpse who is like, it’s Weekend at Bernie’s. He’s being carted out by these evil advisors
Rosin: For the deep state—
Foer: To do their progressive bidding.
And then they have the Hunter Biden thing, which I think has been so successful because, like I described the aging, the mental-acuity continuum, there’s this corruption continuum that now exists where Hunter Biden did his thing, and Joe– and Donald Trump did his thing. Nevermind that fundamentally subverting the democracy and, like, 90 different counts that have been indictable is very different than your son lying about his drug use on a gun application. Different in kind, but they’ve successfully created this impression that, you know, Joe Biden is just another elite who is getting away with it because he’s using his connections.
Plott Calabro: I do think, though, that there is a dimension that we haven’t addressed yet, and we should because Frank in particular has done great reporting on it. I would argue that Republicans actually finally gained the foothold they needed to position him as incompetent or less than ideal as a president—what have you—after Afghanistan. His poll numbers have not recovered since Afghanistan, which to me, I just find fascinating as a reporter because it does seem often that we’re in this moment that maybe a new cycle has three days before it fizzles out.
But Afghanistan is something that has kind of remained, like, a throughline of this administration when it comes to perceptions about, you know, competence or incompetence.
Foer: The Afghanistan stuff was so viral and so terrible. And the images of people falling from airplanes and the chaos in the streets. And it was one of those rare occasions where mainstream media and Fox News were completely in sync and somewhat, you know, as mainstream media reacted to it in a very moralizing sort of way.
Rosin: Like, sad for the people there.
Foer: Sad for the people there, outraged at Biden’s behavior and profoundly disappointed in Joe Biden.
Plott Calabro: And it was only really six months into the new administration, so there’s just such fertile ground for, you know, first impressions to be formed.
Rosin: Do you think Joe Biden is maybe too old?
Foer: So here’s, I thought a lot about this when I wrote my book, interestingly, I thought about the age question. It frames the book, but age isn’t a throughline of my story. And I had to question myself afterwards. Why didn’t I push the age question more? And it’s in fact, in the first few years of his presidency, and in effect I was writing a book about governing, age didn’t matter to the way that he governed.
Right now he has the ability to do the job, but there are a couple caveats that are very important that need to be appended to that. He doesn’t have the energy to campaign in the way that he would have a couple of years ago, let alone a couple of decades ago.
And does that become an issue for the republic, that he can’t energetically campaign in that sort of way? Then there’s the question of, Is it a good idea to have an 86-year-old president? I would say no. I would rather not have an 86-year-old president. But I would rather have an 86-year-old president than Donald Trump.
Rosin: I don’t instinctively understand the age question. I understand the gerontocracy question. Like, Why is everybody that old? But I don’t understand the specific age question. Like, 86-year-olds probably, to me, have a lot of experience and wisdom, and this is a terrible period, and Donald Trump is the other choice. Like, it doesn’t enter my mind the way it does a lot of other people.
Foer: It’s true. And I do think that there is, I don’t think, Ukraine or China—these really massive issues that loom over the world, loom over the presidency. Joe Biden happens to have an incredible amount of wisdom and experience as it relates to foreign policy. And to navigate a proxy war against a nuclear power where choices could result in a very, very dangerous escalation that could destroy the planet, there’s a lot of value in having somebody who’s been around the block.
Rosin: And I feel more so reading your book, it’s like a guy with a lot of experience, some amount of self-awareness, a lot of emotional intelligence, drive, sure.
Plott Calabro: Here, I would chime in to say, the conversation that y’all are having right now, and sort of, almost the case that you’re making, is not the one that the White House is currently making. I think where this White House is running afoul of voters, when it comes to this age question, is that they act as though it’s an illegitimate question.
Rosin: I see.
Plott Calabro: Okay, objectively, you know, it’s not really the point whether or not that’s true. The point is that polling day in and day out shows that Americans do care about this question. But White House aides, I mean, you bring it up and they—they act like you’re insane that you would even, like, deign to ask them about Joe Biden’s mortality, like, as a human being.
I mean, President Eisenhower, who, you know, entered office in—what was then, I think at the time, the oldest president—in his ’60s had heart issues pretty early into his term. He really felt that Americans deserved to know that he felt, you know, ready and willing to continue doing his job and, like, was there and with it.
But it was also important to him to demonstrate that even though he personally hated Richard Nixon as his vice president, just really didn’t like the guy, that Americans had the sense that, were something to happen to him, um, that they would be in good hands with Richard Nixon. And this White House is—this White House has not taken on, I guess, a similar mentality that this is something that, you know, is a legitimate thing to care about. Even if they don’t think it is, Americans do, and they should be communicating with the public accordingly.
Rosin: That’s such a good point. I never thought of that. If they just, like, took the Fetterman route, like, Here’s what’s going on. Here’s where I’m going to be ready. Kamala’s, you know, whatever, like just address it.
Plott Calabro: I mean, I’ve said that to White House aides before. I’m like, “Do you not think that it would go over relatively well if your boss were to say, Listen, I know I’m old, but I feel great. I have every expectation of finishing out four more years. But listen, if something, God forbid, were to happen to me, you’re in great hands with Kamala Harris.”
Foer: But they’re clearly worried about voters having to make the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, because they’re not convinced that voters will choose Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
Rosin: I feel like what we are leaving… where we’ve taken our audiences so far, is that the Democrats are sort of, like, drowning under a series of incompetent strategies. And Trump is the clever one. He’s riding it right.
Have you guys, in reporting on Democrats, landed on anything surprising, hopeful, where you think, Oh, that’s a clever move. Or like, That’s a person who knows what’s up.
Plott Calabro: I was on this very stage yesterday. I did a panel with Sarah Longwell, who is a Republican strategist but, you know, very anti-Trump—she publishes The Bulwark and does focus groups constantly, and Alencia Johnson, who is a Democratic strategist. And Sarah at one point turned to Alencia, and she said, “You know, as somebody who very much wants Biden to win, it has been so clear that where Republicans have succeeded in the messaging game the past several years is that when Donald Trump says something, every Republican down the line is on cable news that night repeating it verbatim. With Democrats it’s just never the same.” So Sarah essential says, “I’m just gonna need you guys to kind of, like, get it together in that respect.”
But I mean, going back to the question about the vice president, even it’s just, like, faking that Democrats think Kamala Harris would be an exceptional president if elected.
I mean, Jamie Raskin is on with Jake Tapper, and he’s saying, “Yes or no? Do you endorse Kamala Harris for vice president?” He said, “Well, you know, I haven’t seen polling.” I mean, it was remarkable. And then you have Nancy Pelosi on with Anderson Cooper. He asks her the same question, and he said, “Do you think that Kamala Harris is the best running mate for Joe Biden?”
She said, “He seems to think so, and that’s what matters.”
Rosin: Burn.
Plott Calabro: So Republicans, meanwhile, they’ll, you know—they’ll go on TV, and then you catch them in the green room after, and they’re like, Well, I’m full of shit. I don’t believe any of that, whatever.
Rosin: Okay, anything you guys can prognosticate that feels different than what we all think is gonna happen? “No,” is a fine answer. You’re insiders so…
Foer: Can I just—I want to say one thing about—you talked about the difference between Democrats and Republicans. And I think part of that difference is the level of fear and anxiety that Democrats bring to every sort of political discussion, because the stakes are so existential that—you know, there’s this famous phrase that David Plouffe used to describe Barack Obama’s doubters, that they were bedwetters. And like, if your nightmare is about to descend on America, uh, you’re going to wet the bed all night long.
Rosin: By the way, it is amazing to me that that’s a mainstream political phrase, bedwetter
Foer: Radio Atlantic, this is your next episode.
Rosin: Yes. Bedwetting.
Plott Calabro: An investigation.
Foer: So I think the point is that when you’re bedwetting, you’re anxious, and that when you’re anxious, you’re not actually able to make cold, honest calculations about what’s happening. And there are so many reasons to be afraid of Donald Trump, but the political conditions right now, so many months before the election, are not necessarily reliable.
And if you look at what Nate Cohn has been writing in The New York Times—so I’m not saying anything that’s original, but, I think this is an under appreciated fact—Joe Biden has hemorrhaged support in California, in New York, where you have migrant crises, and you have high inflation—especially high inflation, high gas prices, and so he’s not going to be able to run up the margins in blue-state bastions.
But then you look in the industrial Midwest or the Rust Belt or Wisconsin and Michigan and the like, and Democrats have consistently performed very well there since Trump’s presidency and midterm elections and special elections.
Abortion has been a very salient issue that white voters in those places have actually stuck with Joe Biden. And so it’s possible that, headed into this election, we’re not going to have this massive disjunction between the popular vote and the electoral college.
Plott Calabro: I think another underappreciated dynamic that is likely to play out in a general election with Donald Trump as the nominee, is abortion becomes not so obvious a flashpoint just for Democrats anymore. If Ron DeSantis is the nominee, like, absolutely. I don’t think that Democrats worry about maintaining the independents and maybe more moderate Republican women that they were able to pick off in the midterms. With Donald Trump as the nominee, that issue gets trickier to litigate. I see it being, you know, just as much of a flashpoint in the election—this general election—as I do in the midterms.
And I think that, I mean, it’s just going to be interesting—
Foer: Just because Donald Trump is able to triangulate on the issue?
Plott Calabro: Absolutely. Absolutely. And he’s the only one in the field doing it right now.
Rosin: So it’s neutralized?
Plott Calabro: I don’t think it’s, like, entirely neutralized. I just think it becomes harder if Donald Trump is the candidate.
Rosin: Right. Okay. Last thing. Frank, so the title of your book, The Last Politician, you know, it’s positive to neutral for Biden. but it is, like, it could be interpreted as sort of worrisome for the country ’cause you make it seem as if this person who’s relatively effective, able to get things done, is an absolutely dying breed. And yet the feel of your book is not dark or pessimistic. Like, I actually felt good reading it. It made me feel a little bit hopeful in general about political culture, about the humanity of political culture. You describe the Biden White House as sort of a series of friends. It sounded like a cool office. I was like, Oh, I would like to work in that office.
Foer: It is not a cool office. The people who occupy that office are not cool.
Rosin: It sounded like, sure, like it’s a warm, like a human office. Like, it sounded like decent people working in a human office trying to get—like, I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t get that, like, Veep feeling.
Plott Calabro: That’s the decided lack of Steve Bannon, I would say.
Rosin: Yeah, maybe.
Foer: So my publisher came to me with this idea of writing a book about the first hundred days. And I didn’t want to write a book about Joe Biden. I wanted to write a book about earnest, well-meaning people descending on a government that had been ruined by the last occupant, as they contended with a historic pandemic and an economy that was on the brink.
I had this image of Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff, wearing a headlamp as he was excavating the ruins of government that Trump had left behind. And what was attractive to me about the project was writing a book about governance. I mean, I don’t have—
Rosin: But the fact that such people exist and they take governance seriously, that’s actually hopeful.
Foer: I agree. I agree.
Rosin: Like, that suggests that people go into politics for the right reasons.
And it’s not, like, just the last politician, and Oh no, like, What do we have left? Like, that—that there is a strain of people who care about running the country in that way.
Foer: Yeah, and also, our institutions can work. It’s like the people in this country have so lost faith in institutions. But you look at something like the vaccine, that is a program that was so well-designed, so well executed, that within six months of the Biden people coming into office, you could stroll into your CVS and get a shot that saved your life. Even though the distribution process for that was extremely difficult, and there were pockets of the country that were hard to penetrate, that happened. That worked, and I think that that is a reason to be optimistic.
Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s end there. I don’t want to end with anything pessimistic. I want to end with the possibility that America we could…
Plott Calabro: Maybe Build Back Better, potentially.
Rosin: Thank you all.
Foer: Yeah.
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.