Maybe partisanship isn't everything

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( Ready for something that might be good news about U.S. politics? Or at least, sort of good news? We have a bit more evidence that public opinion still responds to events — and that may mean that healthy incentives for politicians are still in place. President Joe Biden’s approval rating took a bit of a tumble in August and early September, although it appears that it’s stabilized and possibly recovered a bit. The slump began before the collapse of the Afghan government, but after that he dropped from 50% approval down to a low point of 45%, according to the polling average estimate at [FiveThirtyEight](. Since then, he’s moved back up to 46.1% approval. Overall, the numbers show about a 7-percentage-point drop (and a single point recovery), with about a 5-percentage-point dip that appeared to be associated with the news from Afghanistan. Keep in mind that polling averages are more reliable than individual polls, but there’s still plenty of room for error. It’s possible that Biden’s popularity is still declining and that the modest comeback over the last week will turn out to be an illusion. It’s also possible that he lost less ground than it appears (and here’s an [argument]( that the Covid-19 pandemic, and not Afghanistan, was the main driver of the loss). But let’s suppose that the delta wave and Afghanistan together cost Biden about 7 percentage points, moving him from modestly popular to moderately unpopular. The good news here is that events still appear capable of moving presidential approval. Six weeks ago, pundits were amazed at Biden’s public-opinion stability, and in fact Biden is the third consecutive president with relatively stable approval ratings. The possibility was that partisan polarization was so strong that practically everyone interpreted the standard survey question — “Do you approve or disapprove of the way [the current president] is handling his job as president?” — as simply a party identification check. Indeed, that’s almost always been true for about half of U.S. voters; that’s why it’s rare for approval to go above 75% and it never goes much below 25%. The strongest partisans virtually always approve of their own party’s presidents, no matter how many things appear to everyone else to have gone wrong, and they rarely approve of the other party’s president. And that’s fine. Partisanship is a healthy part of the political system. It would be unfortunate, however, if presidential approval never responded to events, because it would remove the strongest incentive for presidents to work hard to deliver positive results for the nation. Politicians care about re-election, and almost all politicians care about the continued success of their party even if they are heading to retirement. After all, their political party contains friends and political allies, and to the extent they care about public policy (as many politicians do) it’s likely that their party shares their policy agenda. And since they want to win future elections and have their party win future elections, politicians — including presidents — want to be popular. That requires positive outcomes. Or at least that’s always been the case. And that means doing their best to ensure positive outcomes, such as peace and prosperity. If popularity no longer depended on events, the incentives would be different. If nothing could shake anyone’s like or dislike of an incumbent president, then elections might depend only on turnout, and a president beset by one disaster after another but who could reliably motivate his strongest supporters would have better prospects than one who managed to produce peace and prosperity but put supporters to sleep for four years. You might think that presidents would care about the good of the nation for altruistic reasons, and they might, but the U.S. political system has always been based on the self-interest of politicians, and with good reason. Besides, when nothing is at stake, it’s easy for any politician to convince herself that her particular preferences are identical to the nation’s interests. It’s harder to believe that when poll numbers start moving. That’s even true if the relationship between presidential actions and events is murky — and if events are interpreted in ways that are beyond the president’s control. Take Afghanistan. One could argue that previous presidents, and not Biden, were responsible for the collapse of the U.S.-trained Afghan army that led to the humiliating rout surrounding the U.S. withdrawal after 20 years of ineffectual nation-building. And I suspect that Biden and his national security team sincerely believe that, in the long run, their policy choices will prove to be wise and more popular than the alternatives available. Supposing that both of those things are true, Biden’s public-opinion slump would be unfair. But it wouldn’t mean that incentives are misaligned. As long as politicians believe they’ll be rewarded for positive outcomes, they’ll try to achieve them — no matter how many times they are also rewarded or punished for things beyond their control. It’s always been possible that a great deal of public-opinion stability during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and the early months of the Biden presidency was a function of stable events, rather than partisan polarization. After all, Obama’s approval numbers did move over time, more or less tracking the economy. Trump’s numbers in his second and third years in particular may have reflected a stalemate between a strong economy pushing upwards and nonstop scandal and unpleasant behavior pushing down, and both the pandemic and Trump’s post-election conduct did produce movement in his polling results. But for those seeking clearer evidence that events can move public opinion, these last several weeks appear to have supplied that evidence. And whatever happens next to Biden, that’s a solid sign that one of the major healthy incentives for politicians is still functioning. 1. Jennifer Victor and Shana Gadarian talk about [polarization, the pandemic, and more](. 2. Carolyn Logan, Aliou Barry and Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny at the Monkey Cage on [politics after a coup in Guinea](. 3. Dan Drezner on Biden’s [China trade policy](. 4. Norman Eisen and Norm Ornstein on [voting rights and the filibuster](. 5. Jack Hererra on [Republican voters in south Texas](. 6. Here at Bloomberg Opinion, Jennifer Doleac on [U.S. crime statistics](. 7. And Ariel Edwards-Levy and Jennifer Agiesta on [public opinion about vaccine mandates]( and other measures to fight the pandemic. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. 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