With less than six months until the presidential election, President Joe Biden’s average job approval rating is 38.7% — making it the lowest 13th quarter approval rating of all nine past presidents in their first term in office. 

Biden’s most recent quarterly ranking puts him at the bottom 12% of all presidential approval rankings since 1945. 

In 2020, Biden clinched victory by narrowly winning in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, analysis by NPR’s Domenico Montanaro found that it was “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”

Latest polling shows Biden trailing Donald Trump in five of six battleground states. Another poll found Trump leading Biden in all seven swing states by 48% to 44%. Even when including third party candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West, Trump still held a four point lead over Biden. 

While Trump is juggling his criminal court cases and campaigning, Biden is attempting to soothe people’s concerns about the economy, his cognitive ability, and the war in Gaza. 

For the Biden campaign, it’s crunch time, and according to Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at University of Buffalo, every move by Biden is made with Electoral College vote tallies in mind. 

“Any behavior that they’re engaging in, they have judged to be electorally beneficial to them, so if they’re engaging in it, they think at the very least that it is not harmful to them, and at best is going to benefit them in some way,” Neiheisel said. 

Here are the six signs that Biden is in panic mode. 

Biden’s willingness to debate Donald Trump

It’s customary for both the Democrat and Republican presidential nominee to debate each other before the general election, and Biden and Trump debated each other twice in 2020. However, up until April, Biden hadn’t expressed any indication that he’d debate Trump, for in March he said that it would depend on Trump’s “behavior” if he were to engage in one. 

But that all changed when his campaign team dropped a video a couple weeks ago of Biden calling on Trump to two debates. 

“Make my day pal,” Biden said in the video. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” a jab to Trump’s legal troubles. 

The debates are a chance for Biden to shake off the public’s perception of him being an incompetent old man who stumbles his way through public addresses. It’s an opportunity for Biden to garner the attention and support of his disengaged base. 

“For the most part they aren’t going to change too many minds,” Neiheisel said. 

If Biden is successful in the debates, it may show a temporary boost in polls, but it is unlikely to have a long term effect. For instance, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry won all three debates against George W. Bush in 2004, according to Gallup, but he still lost the election. 

Biden asserts executive privilege over Robert Hur audio recordings

President Biden asserted executive privilege after the House Committees on Oversight and Accountability and Judiciary issued subpoenas to release the audiotapes of Biden with Special counsel Robert Hur regarding how he handled classified documents. 

The move by the House committee is part of the GOP-lead impeachment hearings on Biden. The release of the transcripts of Biden and Hur’s conversation was disastrous for the president, as the special counsel described Biden to be a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Committee Chair James Comer (R-TN) asserted Biden’s move is a “Hail Mary” and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-AL) accused the president of keeping the recording private out of fear of the American people hearing him be forgetful during an election year.

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them and use them for partisan political purposes,” the White House counsel Edward N. Siskel wrote in a letter. “Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally protected law enforcement materials from the executive branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.” 

Biden is chasing after black voters who are abandoning him

While Joe Biden still holds the support of the majority of black voters, Trump is closing the gap.

Pew research poll found that 77% of black voters support Biden and 18% support Trump — a stark 59 point difference. This current margin of support for Biden is lower than it was in 2020 and even for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Not only is Biden losing black voters to Trump, but some have decided they won’t be participating in the November election after all. A poll found that 62% of black Americans said they were “absolutely certain to vote,” down by 12% points from 2020. Compared to the country overall, intention to vote only dropped by 4% over the past four years. 

In an effort to attract black voters, Biden has earmarked $1 million of a $14 million ad campaign for black and latino media in the month of May. 

Last week, the president met with the “Divine Nine,” a group of leading black sororities and fraternities, and traveled to Detroit to address the NAACP’s Freedom Fund Dinner.

Neiheisel said it’s crucial for black voters in Detroit and Milwaukee to show up on Election Day in order for Biden to win key swing states.

“I think Biden is looking to recreate the 2012 playbook, rather than in 2016  where assumptions were made that the coalitions were going to be there, and then they weren’t,” he said. 

Biden administration courts young voters with weed-friendly policy changes

The Biden administration announced a few weeks ago it planned to change marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III — classifying the drug as less dangerous.

“Given that it’s an election year, the administration doesn’t have a whole lot of levers to pull to do something positive,” Wallen said. “There’s so many difficult things happening. This is one thing they can do that is positive that they can claim credit for, so I think there’s a lot of political wind behind the sails of doing this.”

Legalization of marijuana is a popular policy — about 63% of voters nationally in 2020 supported the measure, and that number increased to 73% for voters under 45.

While marijuana is still illegal under federal law, the reclassification of the drug now opens up the opportunity for medical research, tax breaks for marijuana companies, and potentially opens up the capital markets for investment. As a Schedule III drug, marijuana now falls under the same regulatory category as ketamine and anabolic steroids.

Biden strong mans Israel

In the uproar of student protests across college campuses to growing discontent among Arab Americans, Biden has been accused of being too sympathetic to Israel by key voting blocs.

While Biden previously ignored calls to limit arms shipments to Israel while a humanitarian crisis unfolds in Gaza, that changed when he announced during a May 9 sit-down interview with CNN that he would halt American weapon shipments to Israel if Rafah was invaded. 

Biden acknowledged the fact that civilians have been killed by American-made bombs. 

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” Biden said.

Declaring an Israeli invasion of Gaza to be his “red line,” Biden paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs earlier this month. However, at the same time, the administration approved a $1 billion new weapons package to Israel. 

Biden also called for an immediate ceasefire during his commencement speech at Morehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta, which many of the protesters have been urging him to do. While he was delivering the address, protesters on the perimeter were chanting, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

Biden directs government money to boost get out the vote efforts

The Biden administration has approved federal funds meant for work-study programs to be paid to students registering people to vote. 

The Education Department based its decision on Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which was signed in March 2021. The order encouraged “the federal government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”

The Department warns that schools that fail to comply are at risk of losing their federal funding. 

Robert Eitel, a lawyer with the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, said the Biden administration’s decision is engaging in partisan activity as college campuses typically possess a higher Democratic voter demographic. 

In April, nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general called on the Department of Education to reverse its guidance calling on school administrators to use federal funds to pay students for get-out-the-vote efforts. 

But it’s not just on college campuses that Biden is hoping to win support from newly registered voters. Earlier this month, the House Committee on Small Business subpoenaed the Small Business Administration, claiming the Biden administration was possibly violating the Constitution by funneling resources to register voters in the swing state of Michigan.

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In March, the SBA and the Michigan Department of State announced a joint effort to “promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan,” which will last through Jan. 1, 2036. This coordinated effort came from a 2021 executive order from Biden prompting federal agencies to push for greater access to voting.

The House Small Business Committee found that 22 out of 25 of these outreach events took place in counties with the highest population of the Democratic National Committee’s target demographics, and 11 of 15 Michigan counties showing the largest growth in voter registration over the past year were ranked highest in young voters and black voters.