“I’ll take holes you can’t dig yourself out of for $100, sorry that’s now $200. More inflation? Okay $400.”

Ukraine, whatever one thinks of it, is not a kitchen table concern, and, as I recently noted, is not going to turn around Biden’s poll numbers. It’s the economic numbers that matter and right now they’re catastrophically bad. 

An Associated Press/NORC poll earlier this week indicated that 43 percent of adults approve of Biden’s job performance and 56 percent disapprove — a finding essentially unchanged from the last survey from the same organizations, which was conducted just before the Russian invasion.

A NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll, also released in recent days, showed the same pattern. 

The NewsNation poll had 44 percent of registered voters approving of Biden’s overall job performance and 56 percent disapproving. Those results were virtually identical to a previous survey late last month, right before Biden’s State of the Union address.

The overall numbers matter less than what independents think of the economy. And what do they think of the economy?

Independents took an unfavorable view of Biden’s economic performance by a massive 60-point margin, with just 18 percent approving and 78 percent disapproving.

This is massively bad. When 4 out of 5 swing voters hate your performance on the issue that matters most to them and 1 in 5 approve, your odds are worse than a hedgehog trying to play soccer.

But approval numbers are not the same as election numbers. Even Biden knows that.

The Dems look set to take a beating in the midterms. But Biden’s old boss survived poor economic numbers to win a second term. There were however some different variables there. The economy wasn’t the disaster area it was now. We’ll see how things look in 2024, but people aren’t likely to be seeing gas prices rising every few days two years from now. (If we are, things will be even worse than anyone would have imagined.) Still, they’re likely to be bad. But the Democrats bet big on black turnout and convincing them that Republicans were out-of-touch rich guys who didn’t care about them. It worked well enough.

Biden’s people would love to run the same play again. But I’m skeptical that they can pull it off.