Based on Biden’s performance so far, there’s trouble ahead for Democrats

On the surface, President Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well. But underneath, there are signs of problems, areas where partisan overstretch threatens the underpinnings of what some are hailing as the new order of things.

Biden enjoys a 54 percent average job approval rating, a good mark for a president at midterm or facing reelection but below the 100-day numbers of every post-World War II president except Donald Trump. Biden’s 42 percent disapproval is higher than theirs and about equal to Trump’s. That may understate things if, as The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter suggests, polls are undersampling Republican voters.The deepening partisan divisions of the last quarter century are not over and done with.Biden’s appeal to white non-college voters apparently remains limited. Thus the retirement of downstate Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, head of House Democrats’ campaign committee for the (disappointing) 2020 cycle. Her district voted 58 percent for Barack Obama in 2012 and voted 50 percent to 48 percent for Trump last year; she won by a margin of only 52 percent to 48 percent.Similarly, Rep. Tim Ryan is leaving his Youngstown-Akron district for an iffy US Senate run in Ohio, and suburban Pittsburgh’s Conor Lamb may do so in Pennsylvania. Nor are Biden Democrats doing all that well among the upscale voters repelled by Trump. The May 1 special election in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex resulted in the nomination of two Republicans in a district that Trump carried by only a margin of 51 percent to 47 percent last year. Republican candidates won 62 percent of the votes, and Democrats only 37 percent.This may reflect liberal apathy. The audience for Biden’s April 28 speech was about 30 percent smaller than Trump’s audience for his 2020 State of the Union. Viewership of pro-Biden MSNBC and CNN is down by even larger percentages. And the never-Trump constituency seems to be fading as well.