The initial Democratic panic over this weekend’s New York Times poll has subsided a bit, and you’re seeing some of the usual suspects like Donna Brazile and Jim Messina assure Democrats that things looked grim for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, and Obama ended up winning comfortably. The implication is that Biden has just hit a rough patch, and the almost 81-year-old Biden will make a comeback comparable to Obama’s in the 2012 cycle.

Every now and then I take a look at this assessment from Susan Glasser of The New Yorker from late September 2021. A couple other columnists and I had been hitting Biden pretty hard during that period. The withdrawal from Afghanistan had been a scandal and national humiliation, China was blowing off Biden’s effort at rapprochement, migrants continued to surge across the southern border, and Biden was struggling to get his agenda passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress. I wrote that the Biden team looked “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads. A flailing president is a failing president.”

Glasser tsk-tsked and declared my assessment was “wildly overstated” and that it’s “too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history.” Instead, Glasser assured readers, “what we might be seeing, instead, is a bit of a return to normalcy in American politics—the kind of normalcy in which a President’s job-approval rating goes up or down depending on how people think he is actually doing.”

Well, from the perspective of November 2023… no, Biden’s job approval has not gone up and down much. The verdict of Americans has been strikingly consistent over the past two years and change. Judging from Biden’s job approval ratings – take your pick between RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight, they both look bad – Biden never bounced back, and the public perception of his presidency never recovered from the late summer of 2021. A good day for Biden has his job approval number in the low to mid-forties, a bad day has it in the upper thirties. Survey after survey, more than half of Americans disapprove of the job Biden is doing, sometimes surpassing 60 percent. And note that polls that show Biden leading a 2o24 rematch with Trump seem to be getting rarer and rarer.

If Democrats want to squint, they could argue that the 2022 midterms represented something of a rebound for Biden. But the exit polls indicated that 55 percent of voters didn’t approve of the job Biden was doing, that 47 percent thought his policies were hurting the country and just 33 percent thought Biden’s policies were helping the country, and that 74 percent of voters said they were “disappointed” or “angry” about the state of the country. The story of the 2022 midterms was an American public that was unsatisfied with what they were getting from Biden and the Democrats… but that found a lot of Republican candidates – often Donald Trump’s hand-picked favorites – nutty, extreme, and unacceptable. Americans did not feel warm and fuzzy towards Biden on Election Day 2022; they just disliked the Republican options even more in a bunch of key races.

Maybe that dynamic will play out again in 2024. But I think one indisputable change from the summer and fall of 2020 – besides the end of the Covid pandemic – is that if a majority of Americans ever bought into that campaign image of Joe Biden as America’s genial, avuncular, back-slapping, competent and unifying grandfather, they don’t buy it now. Forty-two percent of respondents told the New York Times Siena pollsters that they have a “very unfavorable” view of Biden, and another 15 percent said they have a “somewhat unfavorable” view of him – that adds up to 57 percent! Forty-seven percent strongly agree that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president, and another 24 percent somewhat agree, adding up to 71 percent! (Only 38 precent said Trump was just too old to be an effective president.) When asked, Do you think Joe Biden has the personality and temperament to be an effective president?” 46 percent said yes, 51 percent said no. Only 35 percent said Biden “has the mental sharpness to be an effective president?” Sixty-two percent of registered voters said Biden did not.

Perhaps most spectacularly, the Siena pollster asked, “If Joe Biden won the election, do you think it would be good for America or bad for America, or would it not make much difference either way?” and just 7 percent – seven! – said that it would be very good or somewhat good for America if Biden was reelected, while 44 percent said it would be very or somewhat bad. Forty-three percent of registered voters answered that it would not make much difference either way. A number like this indicates that even most Biden voters are supporting the incumbent out of a resigned, exhausted acceptance, not out of any enthusiasm.

Also note that last month’s AP poll found 35 percent of U.S. adults believe that President Biden himself has done something illegal regarding his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and an additional 33 percent say they think the Democratic president behaved unethically, but not illegally. Majorities of Americans aren’t all that convinced that the president is an honest or ethical man, never mind whether he’s an effective president.

But hey, maybe that big Biden comeback is just around the corner.