Apart from anxiety about his age, there isn’t a chattering-class consensus why his presidency is such a political flop

Which is why, perhaps, there was a rush to declare his State of the Union address a rip-roaring success, as though all Biden needs to do to right things is to  talk loudly through more than an hour of prepared remarks.

I also think, though, that this kind of media mystification is what you’d expect given the political realignment we’re experiencing, where right and left are sorting increasingly by class and education, and where anti-institutionalism has migrated more to the political right.

Some of them are the sort of disillusioned and infrequent voters whose grievances tend to be harder to pin down. 

But many are politically moderate minority voters, especially lower-middle-class Hispanics and African Americans, who already tended somewhat rightward in 2016 and 2020 but now seem to be abandoning Biden in larger numbers.

In a recent Substack post, Ruy Teixeira described the realignment since 2012: 

“In that election, Obama carried nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters by a massive 67 points, while losing white college graduates by seven points.” 

Whereas today, “Biden is actually doing worse among the nonwhite working class, carrying them by a mere six points, than among white college graduates, where he enjoys a 15 point advantage over Trump.”

Ross Douthat New York Times 9 March 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/joe-biden-approval-unpopular.html