Biden has his work cut out for him in 2022 as approval rating slumps among Democratic voters

If there's good news to report about President Joe Biden's approval rating as we close out the year, it's that the hemorrhaging appears to have taken a break, for now.

Both Civiqs and FiveThirtyEight.com show similar trends with Biden’s downward slide leveling off. The numbers will be outdated by the time this piece publishes (I'm writing on Dec. 21) but at this point, the trend lines are more important anyway.

But that slight improvement over the last month doesn't do much to blunt the bad news heading into 2022: Biden is sucking wind with Democrats. In fact, at the time of this writing, Biden's approvals had dropped 14 points among Democrats to 76% since passage of the American Rescue Plan in March, when 90% of Democrats approved of the job Biden was doing.

Biden has taken a similar double-digit plunge among independents, just 26% of whom now approve of the job he is doing.

But for now, the worst news is President Biden's standing among Democratic voters—if they aren't motivated to vote next year, Democrats will get crushed in the midterms.

I wrote more earlier this month about Democrats' prospects in 2022 and the necessity of them staging an all-hands-on-deck effort on voting rights next year.