Just what has Biden accomplished anyway?

"Politics," it's often been said, "is the art of the possible." It is, to crib another famous phrase, a constant tension between campaigning in poetry, while governing in prose — and perhaps nowhere more so than in the White House, where a president's every action (and inaction) is scrutinized for signs of deeper significance and political import.

For President Biden, the dissonance between promise and accomplishment has long seemed particularly stark; an early 2023 Washington Post-ABC poll indicated that a significant majority of the country — more than 60% — saw his time in office as having accomplished little to nothing. More recently, a Wall Street Journal poll released last month showed former President Donald Trump with a 12-point lead over Biden among respondents who agreed he had a “strong record of accomplishments.”

Those measures of public sentiment, however, seem at odds with the reality of Biden's tenure in the White House. Despite having a "lot of things to tout," the Biden administration's triumphs have "not penetrated the American public," NBC's Chuck Todd noted in February.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So what has Joe Biden accomplished, anyway?

Isn't it the economy, stupid?

Longtime Democratic election strategist James Carville’s oft-repeated (and frequently parodied) aphorism has become political shorthand for why Biden's list of economic accomplishments has hardly seemed to move the needle in his administration's favor. Indeed, on the economic front, the Biden White House has notched a number of historic victories, particularly when it comes to adding jobs to the U.S. economy. In his first year in office, employers added 6.6 million jobs, an all-time record, per CNN, for a president's initial 12 months in office. In January 2023, the country's unemployment rate dropped to its lowest point in more than half a century.

In spite of Biden's robust gains, public sentiment around the administration's economic achievements has ranged from underwhelming to overt hostility. A suite of mid-term polls from both the Post/ABC News and Fox News show Biden's economic approval well below his general approval score, while more than half disapprove of his handling of the economy, per a February 2023 CBS News survey. The disparity is likely the result of an "ongoing focus on inflation" rather than the complete — and much more optimistic — economic picture, according to Yahoo's Ben Werschkul. 

Okay, but what about inflation?

Despite taking a significant polling hit over weakening purchasing power, the Biden administration has indeed addressed the country's growing inflation, most pointedly with the $750 billion 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. All told, the bill represents "one of the most significant laws in our history," Biden said during its signing ceremony. After some noticeable delay, it seems the effects of the bill are starting to make their presence known: as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah pointed out in September, “hourly wage increases exceeded inflation for the first time in two years” this past summer. Similarly, The White House’s late-August release of the first 10 drugs that will qualify for medicare price negotiations marked a major step forward in a long-awaited democratic priority expected to “unfold over the coming months, with the new prices taking effect in 2026,” according to The New York Times. 

Planes, trains, and automobiles?

During former President Donald Trump's administration, the phrase "infrastructure week" became something of a running joke thanks to the many, many unfulfilled promises to roll out a comprehensive plan addressing the nation's aging bridges, highways and beyond. Less than one year into his term, Biden signed a $1.2 trillion dollar bipartisan infrastructure package into law, the effects of which have finally begun to be felt some two years later.

Guns, too?

As a candidate in 2020, Biden campaigned on the promise of sweeping gun control legislation akin to that passed under Bill Clinton in 1994. As president, however, Biden's ambitions to curb firearm violence have been trimmed considerably, and by the time he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in June 2022, it had been stripped of the assault weapons ban, high capacity magazine ban, and universal background checks that he'd discussed on the campaign trail. Nevertheless, the bill — the first major federal firearms legislation since the 90s — was hailed as both a bipartisan victory (14 House Republicans supported it) and a significant step forward for the long-stagnant push for tighter gun laws.

Although the bill "doesn't do everything I want," Biden admitted during the signing ceremony, "it does include actions I've long called for that are going to save lives." Among those actions were increased funding for mental health programs and school security, as well as legislative measures to close the so-called "boyfriend loophole" and expanded background checks for certain types of prospective gun buyers. 

Reshaping the judiciary

Capitalizing on Democrats’ Senate majority, the Biden White House has prioritized judiciary reform. As noted by ABC News, the administration has outpaced the three previous administrations while placing more than 100 new judges — many of them women and/or people of color — on the bench at both the appellate and, in the case of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court level.

He walks the line

While Biden has long touted himself as “the most pro-union president In American history,” his executive track record when it comes to labor organizing has left many in his base underwhelmed, particularly after he helped avert a major railway workers strike over the objections of workers and progressive lawmakers alike. Nearly a year later, though, Biden made history as the first sitting president to walk a picket line, when he joined striking United Auto Workers Local 174 in Belleville, Michigan, in September 2023. “The middle class built the country,” Biden proclaimed to the striking workers, adding that “unions built the middle class.” Biden’s visit, historic as it was, was also a savvy election-cycle effort to woo “perhaps the most prominent labor union that has yet to formally support his reelection bid,” according to the Times. 

So what has he left undone?

Despite campaign promises in both 2020 and 2022 to codify federal abortion access ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Biden has thus far been unable to deliver legislative action to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, stymied, in part, by the 60-vote threshold in the Senate and the unwillingness from members of his own party to circumvent filibuster rules.

The president has also failed to deliver on his effort to deliver comprehensive immigration reform, which he'd prioritized on his first day in office with the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, arguing during a February speech that "congressional Republicans have refused to consider my comprehensive plan." 

Biden also conspicuously removed his campaign proposal for free community college from the massive spending bill (though he stressed at the time that he is “not going to give up on community colleges as long as I'm president”), and has largely failed to stymie conservative lawmakers’ efforts to link his administration to his son Hunter Biden’s various business ventures, some of which may have run afoul of lobbying regulations. Despite a lack of compelling evidence connecting the White House with the younger Biden’s machinations, Republicans have continued to make the president’s family — and his own alleged criminality — a centerpiece of their election-year messaging, threatening impeachment and prosecution as the administration works to portray itself as conspicuously above the fray. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in September showed 41% of the public supported a Biden impeachment probe, including 71% of Republican respondents. 

Still, no matter which priorities the administration has left unchecked so far, the president himself is choosing to focus on his wins. Asked after the midterms whether he planned to change tactics to convince the public that he has, contrary to popular sentiment, accomplished a lot, Biden said he'd change "nothing, because they're just finding out what we're doing."

"The more they know about what we're doing," he continued, "the more support there is."