Fickle voters: a sign democracy may survive

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Lots of things are broken right now in U.S. politics. The good news is that there's new evidence that one important thing is working just fine: When bad things happen presidents get less popular, and when good things happen? Their approval ratings improve.

Six weeks ago, President Joe Biden's approval ratings were falling rapidly. That continued into July, eventually reaching a low point of 37.5%, according to FiveThirtyEight. He's recovered a fair amount, gaining 3 percentage points over the last 30 days.

No one can prove why Biden's numbers have bounced back, but two major drags on American life during his presidency — gas prices and COVID-19 cases — are finally dropping at the same time in recent weeks. Jobs, meanwhile, remain strong, while overall inflation is still high but tailing off. As a result, overall perceptions of the economy are rising.

There have been other positive developments in the news — including some Biden is more directly responsible for — but the history of approval ratings suggests that they are less likely to be affected by passing bills and signing them into law.

All of this is very good news about the political system. While it seems obvious, it's a healthy sign for our politics if positive news makes presidents more popular, and negative news makes them less popular. And there's been a lot of speculation otherwise.

To some analysts, it looked like sharpening partisan polarization was ushering in a new era of presidential politics. Views of the president would depend on partisanship, not the actual state of the union. If true, then presidents would no longer have a strong electoral incentive to produce results that made voters happy.

As long as presidents and their party have strong incentives to produce positive results and to avoid doing things that would make voters unhappy, the basic structure of democracy should, over time, tend to have good outcomes. That's a big deal!