NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {C} BS News is right to couch its latest poll in a variety of caveats.

“The summer before an election year is not always kind to first-term Democrats,” the outlet’s reporters observe correctly. Key components of the president’s coalition are not yet tuned in to the upcoming election cycle. Joe Biden is underperforming with minority voters to a degree that would be historic if it held up next November. And so on.

But the findings of the latest CBS News/YouGov poll also suggest that the president and his party took a variety of calculated risks in Biden’s first two years in office that will haunt them through the remainder of his term. Their strategic gambles backfired in ways that may yet prove spectacular.

“As president,” Biden assured Democrats at his party’s 2020 nominating convention, “the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that’s ruined so many lives.” Specifically, that involved restoring the economic status quo ante, getting kids back into classrooms, and pursuing policies that would reduce the rate of bad outcomes resulting from a Covid-19 infection to the point of negligibility. “I will end this,” Biden declared.

With these and a variety of similar promises over the course of the president’s first year in office, Biden took ownership of the pandemic in ways Donald Trump never did. The initial impacts of the pandemic are a memory today, but its lingering second-order effects are still with us. They are a source of widespread resentment. And because Biden made pandemic recovery a singular priority, the blame for failing to deliver the kind of “normal” he promised to restore has fallen disproportionately on his administration.

CBS found that 45 percent of all voters believe they are “worse off” in financial terms than they were before the pandemic, including a majority of self-described independents. It’s clear that these voters don’t assign any blame to Trump for the financial woes they associate with the pandemic because a staggering 71 percent of them are backing Trump, while just 28 percent of them support Biden.

It’s understandable that voters would assign blame for their pandemic-related misfortunes to the politician who promised to deliver relief for their hardships rather than to the politician who treated the pandemic like a compartmentalizable nuisance. Voters associate Democratic raids on the U.S. Treasury in the name of pandemic-mitigation efforts with rising rates of inflation. What’s more, polling indicates that voters believe Trump is better suited to restore price stability than Biden (by an eleven-point margin). Whether it’s attributable to short memories, the Biden White House’s failure to manage expectations, or a generalized economic anxiety, the bulk of voters’ residual pandemic-related frustrations falls on Biden. That’s hardly inexplicable. The president sought to own the pandemic as an issue, and he succeeded.

The bad news for Biden in CBS’s latest survey doesn’t end there. Only about half the country is even aware of the Biden administration’s successful pursuit of a $1 trillion infrastructure-spending bill. A similar number of Americans know that congressional Democrats passed legislation allowing Medicare to fix prescription-drug prices. Much less than half the country has heard about Democrats’ efforts to expand background checks for firearms purchasers. This is a political headache for Democrats because, as CBS notes, “independents who have heard about” Biden’s achievements “are backing him, but those independents who have not heard about those things are voting for Trump.”

Again, we’re confronted with an obvious consequence of Democrats’ half-hearted messaging efforts around these legislative accomplishments: Why should voters look favorably upon reforms about which Democrats themselves are ambivalent?

It’s possible that voters are savvy enough to have noticed that Democrats spent the first ten months of Biden’s presidency arguing that “infrastructure” was a category broad enough to include virtually every left-wing policy priority. The White House pursued investments in “social and civic infrastructure” and “caregiving infrastructure,” arguing in effect that the roads and bridges that spring to mind when contemplating “infrastructure” did not meet the measure of the moment. The slimmed-down “physical infrastructure” product Congress eventually approved compelled Democrats to climb down from their initial negotiating posture. Why wouldn’t voters notice that?

Likewise, Democrats have invested little time and energy in popularizing the first major gun-control legislation to be signed into law in 30 years, in part because they did not like the bill. When they do talk about it, the first words out of the mouths of Biden and the most prominent members of his party are that the bill “doesn’t do everything I want.” What they want is a meaningful reduction in gun violence, which a bill that creates incentives for states to enact “red-flag laws” and prevents convicted domestic abusers from purchasing firearms can’t really achieve. Democrats treated their own bill like a contemptible half-measure. Again, why wouldn’t voters be aware of this?

The most laughable of the Democrats’ frustrations involves the degree to which voters aren’t aware that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act authorized Medicare’s prescription-drug price-fixing scheme. That was the whole point of calling it the “Inflation Reduction Act” — an act of deception Biden himself regrets. When you commit to using bait-and-switch tactics to get controversial legislation past the finish line, you don’t get to complain that your marks remain focused on the bait.

Lastly, CBS found that Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness gambit has gone bust. Liberals and Democrats are dissatisfied with the White House’s efforts to discharge student-loan debt, with most believing the president should be “doing more” on that front. A plurality of voters, including most independents, disagree with Democrats. The effect of Biden’s gesture toward student-loan relief has been to disappoint Democrats while radicalizing and polarizing the opposition to his policy preferences.

It was supposed to be the other way around. Democrats, including Biden, acknowledged the unconstitutionality of student-debt forgiveness via executive fiat, but the party didn’t see the downside to its pursuit. As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Michael Pierce said, the White House should “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist.” In other words, the president and his allies should rally voters against the courts and the GOP-brought challenges when the justice system invariably puts a halt to Biden’s power grab. It was a profoundly cynical and reckless abuse of authority — one that has blown up in the president’s face.

Democrats are today confronting political circumstances they cannot entirely comprehend. Trump is anathema to them and, as they believe the electoral evidence suggests, most of the country’s voting population. The case against the former president is self-evident. But a positive argument for Biden’s continued occupancy of the Oval Office remains elusive. If Democrats are confused as to why that is, they should look in a mirror. The most convincing case against Biden’s presidency is the one they themselves have made for it.