Jonathan Bernstein: “It’s hard to prove anything about such things; there are too many possibilities at play. But it’s certainly suggestive that the pandemic case count bottomed out in the first week of July, so Biden’s slide began right around the time that people started noticing that things were, once again, getting worse. And it continued as economic numbers deteriorated throughout the third quarter.”
“It’s true that the Covid-19 wave peaked in early September, and that case counts have been dropping for about two months now (although they’ve stagnated again). It’s also true, as the data journalist G. Elliott Morris notes, that Biden still gets better marks from voters on his handling of the coronavirus than on most other things. But that doesn’t mean the virus — and its effects on the economy — are not the main cause of Biden’s poor approval. If people have turned pessimistic about the nation and the economy, they are likely to take that out on the president, full stop. Even, paradoxically, if they think it’s not his fault.”
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