This post may refer to COVID-19
To access official information about the coronavirus, access CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
thehill.com
Winter challenges are coming for Biden White House
President Biden is facing a challenging winter.Supply chain bottlenecks spurred by increased demand threaten to hold up Christmas gifts.
Politics
President Biden is facing a challenging winter.
Supply chain bottlenecks spurred by increased demand threaten to hold up Christmas gifts.
Businesses are facing labor shortages, which are likely to lead to inconveniences for Americans traveling during the holiday season.
Rising gas prices will add to those headaches, and now administration officials are warning that heating homes also will cost more this year.
And as it gets colder, inside gatherings could lead to more coronavirus cases, which have started to flatline after weeks in which they have fallen.
It all adds up to a difficult winter and potentially troublesome holiday season for President Biden, who already has seen his approval numbers drop amid a challenging few months for his administration. Fears that Biden’s party could lose the House and Senate in next year’s midterms are also up after a disappointing showing in last week’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
“It’s pretty bleak,” one Democratic strategist who spoke to The Hill said. “I don’t think people realize where we are as a party right now.”
Biden closed last week with some good news. A positive jobs report started the day out well on Friday, and the House finally approved a $1 trillion infrastructure bill by the end of the day that is a key part of the president’s agenda.
But the White House and Democrats have struggled to sell their accomplishments, stirring worries within the party.
“The White House needs to figure out how to effectively communicate what it’s trying to do or people will lose faith,” the pessimistic strategist said.
Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.
A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll taken last week before the infrastructure bill’s passage found that only 38 percent of registered voters approve of Biden’s job as president and 46 percent believe he has performed worse as president than they expected.
In some good news for Biden, the same survey did find that over 60 percent approve of the infrastructure bill.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain acknowledged when asked Sunday in NBC’s “Meet the Press” about Biden’s low poll numbers that it has been a “rough and tough year” and that Americans have been frustrated with the pace of the recovery from the pandemic.
At the same time, he noted that job creation has picked up substantially under Biden when compared to the Trump administration, and that coronavirus deaths have fallen sharply.