Sloped

Afghanistan withdrawal began Biden's political slide

This has been a generally accepted tenet of American politics. Why, I'm not sure, given that President Biden's approval numbers started to slide almost immediately after his inauguration.

This chart from Axios shows as much:

The general downward trend is fairly evident from the beginning, and there are no steep dips that start immediately after the withdrawal.

It's tempting, I think, to chalk the story up to the stereotypical media outlet's "love of narrative," but I'm not sure that's the reason. Granted, the media is always on the lookout for a good story, and this one seems to be fairly straightforward, but it doesn't appear to be supported by the evidence. Evidence that, in this case, comes with the story itself. I'm not sure that someone looked at this chart and the first thing that occurred to them was that there was some singular event that triggered a fall in the President's popularity.

Not that the Presidential approval rating is worth all that much. Were it up to me, I'd use it as more of a gauge of public sentiment overall - do people perceive that things are going well for themselves and/or the nation as a whole or are likely to in the near future. Or simply scrap it entirely. In recent years, the poll has become mainly a measure of partisanship. Although, to be sure, that ties into the public sentiment piece. Voters that identify with Democrats have more negative views of the economy and the like when Republicans are running Washington, D. C., and vice versa.

But people simply not getting what they want, and then blaming the President (either directly, or as a proxy for their political party) doesn't make for a particularly compelling political story. Because, I think, we all know that already.

President Biden won the office most by virtue of the fact that his name was not Donald Trump. In the eyes of Republicans, that already made him the wrong man for the job. And given that simply not being Donald Trump isn't the same as having the political leverage to undo the aftereffects of President Trump's time in office, Democrats and independent voters who wanted sweeping changes and repudiation of the old order didn't get that, and their enthusiasm for President Biden started waning pretty much from the beginning of his term, as reality set in.

That's not a single event, but many of them. But while that reality may be suitable for short-form journalism, the details of it; the narrative, if you will, is not.