RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democrats are being butchered in the polls, with their progressive shift not sitting well with average Americans. According to FiveThirtyEight, President Biden’s approval rating is hovering at 42 percent — that’s more than ten percentage points lower than at the same time last year. His falling approval is mirrored by his party, with 42.5 percent of Americans saying they want a Democratic win on the generic congressional ballot, as opposed to 44.7 percent favoring Republicans.

Despite Biden’s “unity” promise, Democrats are catering to a small, progressive wing whose goals simply do not resonate with Americans. On the April 1 episode of Potomac Watch from the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel was discussing Biden’s approval ratings and said:

There’s . . . increasing frustration with Joe Biden that he is pushing an agenda that is out of tune with what most Americans are interested in seeing done. . . . Joe Biden is following the agenda of a very small wing of his party that’s ascendant, the progressive wing, but that is not reflective of national mood or politics.

And yet, progressives think the polling problem is due to not being progressive enough. Last week, for instance, Chris Hayes blamed Joe Manchin and the failure of Build Back Better for “single-handedly” costing Democrats their standing among Americans. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez simply believes that the president isn’t delivering the progressive agenda he promised. On Errol Louis’s podcast, she said that “this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters” (well, actually, it is). She went on: “This is really about the collapse of support among young people, base, feeling like they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren’t necessarily being seen.”

Given poll numbers, these notions are inexplicable and, more than that, self-destructive.

But some Democrats — notably those in competitive reelection races — are waking up from the progressive fantasy. Nothing quite demonstrates this development like the response to the impending expiration of Title 42. Democrats are starting to question, quite vocally, the president’s failure to manage the migration deluge that looms.

Title 42, a pandemic-related order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that limited asylum seekers at the border, is being lifted by the Biden administration on May 23 — on the grounds of public health, according to the CDC.

Biden already has a dire border crisis on his hands. In February, there were 164,973 encounters with people trying to cross the southern border illegally. Though 1.7 million Title 42 expulsions have taken place under Biden, the administration continues to release thousands of migrants into the U.S. interior, encouraging more migrations to the southern border. In December alone, 55,000 migrants were released.

With the lifting of Title 42, the Biden administration will probably be overrun by migrants at the border. It’s already bad; the DHS is currently reporting an average of 7,100 daily encounters, up from 5,900 in February, and is bracing for a “mass migration event” of up to 170,000 encounters in the days and weeks after May 23. Axios reported that, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the worst-case scenario would be 12,000 to 18,000 encounters a day.

To give some perspective: Referring to his time as Obama’s DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson said that anything over 1,000 daily encounters “overwhelms the system,” and anything over 4,000 is a “crisis.” That was in 2019.

This Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Johnson said the Biden administration is facing a “political cost” for surging numbers at the border. Referring to the 7,100 daily encounters, Johnson said “that’s a high number” and noted that “under almost any scenario, it’s challenging for the Border Patrol, for ICE, to properly process and track these individuals.”

He thinks the repeal is premature due to its being “peak season” for migration: “I would have argued that we should keep it in . . . until perhaps July, when these numbers do tend to slow down in the hotter weather.”

Other Democrats seem to agree. Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.), who is up for reelection this year, told CNN, “I think this is the wrong time” to lift Title 42, adding, “I haven’t seen a plan,” referring to the administration’s lack of preparation for the expected influx. Senator Gary Peters (D., Mich.) said, “It’s important that the administration has a plan to deal with what will happen as a result of lifting.” Senator Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is up for reelection, said, “It’s obvious that there’s not a plan in place. . . . We need an orderly process.”

Democrats are even pursuing legislation to resist the Biden administration. NR reported that on Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators will propose legislation to stall the repeal of Title 42 until the Biden administration comes up with a plan to deal with the inevitable surge. Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) and James Lankford (R., Okla.) are introducing the bill with four Democrats and five Republicans. Sinema isn’t a surprise; she and Kelly wrote a letter to President Biden last month asking for Title 42 to continue until he is “completely ready to implement and coordinate a comprehensive plan that ensures a secure, orderly, and humane process at the border.”

Until now, Democrats were trying to keep progressive allies and activists happy. But it’s just not a sustainable strategy: Most Americans are critical of the current approach to immigration.

In May 2021, for instance, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 80 percent of Americans said the surge at the border is a crisis. Eighty percent of respondents said that illegal immigration was very or somewhat serious. Sixty-five percent believed that Biden’s policies encourage illegal immigration.

Biden or no Biden, Americans are also wary of an open border. Sixty-eight percent felt that migrants who cross the southern border illegally should be turned around. Fifty-four percent of respondents said open borders encourage the “flow of drugs and crime” into the country.

Immigration is a decisive voting issue. Biden, for instance, faces some of his harshest disapproval on immigration. As of late February, Biden’s handling of immigration polls at 32 percent approval. Among those polled, 25 percent rank immigration as a top-three priority. With the midterms coming up, Democrats running for reelection can’t afford to tank on a top-three issue.

Democrats are finally taking note. And it’s not just moderates such as Sinema and Manchin. On the April 7 episode of Potomac Watch, Mene Ukueberuwa noted that Mark Kelly and Mark Warner — both Democrats who are criticizing Biden’s Title 42 repeal — “aren’t exactly the vanguard of moderation within the Democratic Party.” They are behind “basically every single Biden-administration proposal including Build Back Better up to this point.”

This is more than just realizing the futility of Biden’s open borders. This is realizing that the public response to hyper-progressive priorities — in the schools, in the economy, in culture — is an electoral time bomb for Democrats, no matter what AOC says.