Biden’s growing challenge: Voters are warming to Trump’s presidency

CNN —

During Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, he was famously the only president whose job approval rating never reached 50% in Gallup Organization polls since the firm began systematically tracking that measure in the 1940s.

But now more positive retrospective assessments of Trump’s record in office are setting off warning flares for Democrats — especially as President Joe Biden’s own approval ratings remain stuck at historically low levels. In a CNN poll from April, 55% of Americans said they considered Trump’s presidency a success — a big jump from the 41% who viewed his presidency so positively when he left office in January 2021, according to a CNN survey from the time.

If Biden is to win a second term, “the fact that Trump is getting this level of credit cannot stand,” said Democratic pollster Jay Campbell, who conducts surveys on the economy with a Republican partner for CNBC.

It’s not unusual for approval ratings of presidents to rise out of office. The difference is that none of Trump’s defeated predecessors sought to return to the White House four years later. The public’s shifting ratings of those former presidents was of interest mostly to historians; this year, these reassessments will help decide control of the White House.

Generally, Biden’s campaign has spent less time challenging Trump’s record in his first term than highlighting what he might do in a second one. But that balance appears to be shifting.

Biden’s campaign has invested heavily in emotional swing-state television advertisements that tie Trump to the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion with the stark concluding tagline: “Donald Trump did this.”

Now, Biden’s team is escalating