I usually don't discuss domestic US politics in these updates aside from unions and really significant things, mostly the evil empire's wider influence on the world, but:

Biden’s Approval Slump Hits a Dreary New Milestone Bloomberg

The bad news for President Joe Biden is that his popularity has fallen, this past week, into dead last place. Of the 13 presidents during the polling era, none has been in worse shape at this point in his first term, almost 500 days into a presidency, than Biden’s 40.5% approval rating. That’s according to FiveThirtyEight’s estimate of his average standing in all the public opinion polls. It’s not quite Biden’s own low point — he briefly dipped a bit lower in late February — but it’s close.

Is there any good news for the president? Sort of. His 40.5% is not a historic low for first-term presidents. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman all had lower lows. Clinton, Reagan and Truman hit bottom before being re-elected, with the latter two dipping well below 40% closer to their elections than Biden is to his. Indeed, there’s no relationship between approval ratings at the 500-day mark and re-election.

The news is worse for Democrats with respect to this November’s midterm elections, however. It’s not clear when voters make up their minds before heading to the polls for general elections, but political scientists do know that presidential approval ratings are usually strong factors affecting midterm results.

It’s impossible to be certain about the reasons for Biden’s miserable ratings, but I believe that the big factors have been the pandemic and the economy, with the latter pretty much about inflation. If that’s true, then moderating prices and waning Covid-19 surges would be the factors most likely to turn things around.

That is, of course, easier said than done. Especially since what seems to matter are results, not policies, even concerning circumstances over which presidents have little short-term control. The other potential bit of good news for Biden is that what usually matters is the direction of change, not the level. So if gasoline prices trend down over the next several months from the current national average of $4.60 a gallon to $4 or so, Biden may well be better off than if prices had been at $4 the whole time, and may even be better off than if prices at the pump were slowly rising to, say, $3.75 a gallon. The same should be true of inflation overall.

Remember that approval ratings tend to drive pundits’ (and often politicians’) views of the president and everything he does. When a president is unpopular, then pundits ascribe that trouble to practically everything the president is doing. That’s a fallacy. If it’s true that inflation and the pandemic account for the bulk of Biden’s unpopularity, then other things he’s doing may actually be helping him, not hurting him. But much of what presidents do, even what they do publicly, just doesn’t change the way people think about his success or failure.

I feel like one of the most significant things and yet virtually never talked about, which I've increasingly tried to hammer home, is the idea that the sanctions on Russia were fundamentally necessary as a reaction to the invasion. Like, as if it was a case of simple casualty, and that there is no universe where Russia invaded and we didn't put sanctions on them. When that's not true at all. The West put sanctions on Russia, and they put unprecedented sanctions on Russia, seizing their foreign reserves, and those sanctions are largely the cause of the strife around the world and also in the West. Sure, the invasion of Ukraine itself is impactful because it's a supplier of commodities and food, but in a universe where the invasion is happening and the West is still supplying weapons and maybe puts minor sanctions on Russia but not the kind they currently have, I think the global impacts are at least an order of magnitude lower than they are currently.

Maybe Russia invades Ukraine anyway further down the line, but for this current conflict, I'm 100% sure that if the West did actual diplomacy with Russia and addressed their concerns, then this could have been avoided. There were two Minsk agreements already, and Russia, quite reasonably, saw Ukraine as breaking them. This is the West's and NATO's fault - there's a direct line of casualty that runs throughout the last decade at least with the 2014 coup. You're in a different reality entirely if Russia's interests are respected, one that avoids the mass deaths and the destruction of a country that we're currently seeing, at least in 2022.

So the idea that Biden's approval ratings aren't really something he can fix is kinda true - he could do things like legalize weed and forgive student debt and a bunch of other stuff but the supply chain issues are a bit more fundamental and would take longer to fix - but he and his administration, and the "deep state" (not in the QAnon sense but the real sense that we're largely governed by unelected officials in various agencies), are responsible for the poverty facing many people. But, of course, Bloomberg of all places could never acknowledge that, so all we can do is stare down the oblivion of the midterms.