| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Guess what? President Joe Biden's approval rating isn't set in stone after all. After months of almost eerie stasis, Biden has lost a little ground in public opinion polls over the last month. He's now at 50% approval and 43.8% disapproval, according to the FiveThirtyEight estimate based on some fancy averaging of all the reputable polls out there. That's just a small movement from the low-50s range he's been in since he took office in January. His overall approval range is barely more than five percentage points. By contrast, Donald Trump's range at this point in his presidency was over 10 percentage points; Barack Obama's was around 15. So Biden's remains unusually stable. And his popularity continues to be nothing special historically, at least compared with relatively recent presidents. Through 206 days in office, he continues to have better approval numbers than Trump, Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, while trailing everyone else, but he's now close to both Obama and George W. Bush. All of this is a good reminder that first-year approval ratings tell us nothing about re-election prospects and little about what's likely to happen in midterm elections. It is helpful to a president to be popular — the more popular the president, the more likely people who deal with him are to give the White House the benefit of the doubt when deciding whether to agree to their requests. But it's just way to early to use approval ratings to predict elections. While it's possible that the collapse of the Afghan government after Biden's withdrawal of U.S. military support could have a short-term effect on his approval, it's unlikely that the early reports from Afghanistan had anything to do with his (remember, very modest) slump. Maybe what we're really seeing is the effect of Biden's new-president honeymoon wearing off. If I had to guess, however, I'd say the most likely cause would be the spike in Covid-19 cases caused by the delta variant. But while a dip in Biden's approval rating of two or three percentage points is big enough to make note of, it's probably not worth much analysis. Looking ahead: If Biden stays around that 50% level for another 100 days, he'll fall far behind George W. Bush and lose most of his lead over Clinton. On the other hand, he'll catch or come close to both Obama and Ronald Reagan, and erase most of the margin between himself and Jimmy Carter. Which again is a good reminder that a strong start in popularity, which Carter had, doesn't tell us much about what is to come. There's no way to predict whether Biden will rebound, stay put, or continue to bleed approval slowly over the next 100 days — or the next year or two or three. As always, the odds are strong that the key factors for Biden will remain the interrelated topics of the pandemic and the economy. If that's true, then the biggest three pieces of news so far in August have been the pandemic statistics (bad), the vaccination numbers (more promising, but a long way to go), and the unemployment numbers (encouraging). And those will be the most important factors in September, October, and every month for a while. 1. Dan Drezner on Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. 2. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas has the data on Biden administration executive branch nominations. 3. Elizabeth M.F. Grasmeder at the Monkey Cage on non-citizen U.S. military veterans. 4. Ezra Klein talks with Lilliana Mason about identity politics. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lara Williams has charts and data about the vaccine. 6. Josh Marshall on Afghanistan. 7. And Kevin Drum on Afghanistan. I'm not sure I agree with his alternate perspective, but it's worth considering. I'll add my non-expert two cents. On the one hand, it sure seems that Biden could have handled the withdrawal better. On the other hand? Until someone shows me an example of how to lose a war and make it look good, I'm going to be skeptical that there were better options. Yes, translators and other U.S. allies should have been rescued before the government fell — in an ideal world. But if it was an ideal situation, U.S. troops wouldn't have been leaving and the government would have been stable. So … I'm at least half-inclined to count the chaos as part of the inherent costs of the war rather than a consequence of Biden's or Trump's endgame maneuvering. 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. | 
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