President Joe Biden’s first six months in office lag badly behind former President Donald Trump’s early term in one metric, accord...
President Joe Biden’s first six months in office lag badly behind former President Donald Trump’s early term in one metric, according to The New York Times: getting protested by ideological opponents.
Americans remember well the scenes that greeted Trump’s inauguration following a popular vote loss and an electoral college win in 2016, perhaps best illustrated by the Women’s March.
But six months into his term, President Biden has inspired no such protest movement, not even close. In a new report, the Times analyzed data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, and found only a tiny fraction of conservative protests during Biden’s first 26 weeks in office, conpared to liberal protests of Trump.
And, the paper notes, most of the conservative protests haven’t been about Biden:
Where left-of-center demonstrations made up three-quarters of all demonstrations in the United States during the six months after Mr. Trump entered office, conservative demonstrations account for just 10 percent of the total since Mr. Biden did (protests against racism and policing have accounted for the majority). And at only a few dozen of them have protesters explicitly criticized Mr. Biden, according to the crowd counts, in contrast to the hundreds of Obama-critical Tea Party events held by the summer of 2009.
The lack of a Tea Party-like movement against Biden is attributable to several factors, according to the paper, including Biden’s race:
As a white man, Mr. Biden attracts less of this [former President Barack Obama’s] racialized backlash. And where Mr. Trump’s personal behavior and pugnacious political style stoked liberal activists’ outrage, Mr. Biden’s lower-key, more moderate reputation may offer less of a target.
“It’s not been as easy to fuel a sort of second Tea Party with him in the White House simply because he doesn’t upset people as much,” said Seth Masket, who directs the University of Denver’s Center on American Politics and wrote a book about why Mr. Biden won last year’s Democratic primary.
The durability of this effect and its benefits for Biden remain to be seen. Biden’s approval ratings sailed along in the mid-50s for months before dipping to around 50 percent in July, both of which are levels that Trump never reached during his term.
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