CLAY: Joe Biden is in the middle of an absolute collapse in his overall political support. A poll came out yesterday afternoon while we were on air, Quinnipiac poll, and here, by the way, are the last seven approval ratings in this Quinnipiac poll: 49%, 46%, 42%, 28%, 37%, 36%, and then — yesterday afternoon — 33% approval for Joe Biden, 53% disapproval.

And I want to hit you with a couple of numbers here, Buck, that stood out to me. Joe Biden right now for independent voters has an approval rating of 25%. For black voters even, it’s down to 57%. White voters, 32% approval rating. Hispanic voters have a 28% approval rating right now for Joe Biden. That is lower than white voter approval ratings. These are numbers that are unbelievable.

BUCK: Joe Biden is about as popular as a root canal, everybody. That’s where we are here, and this is astonishing but not surprising, either, when you look at what the promise was of this administration. You know, we talk about the failures in specifics of the border, the economy, calculation, crime, all these things, and we say Joe Biden. It’s really the regime.

It’s Democrats setting the narrative and the political agenda across the nation in different ways, and certainly in the era of covid they’ve been more engaged in overreach — and, I think, constitutional violation — than at any time we’ve seen really in my lifetime. I can’t think of anything that is really quite as bad. There are some moments in the War on Terror where things maybe got heavy-handed with the government here at home, but nothing on the scale that we’ve seen with covid.

But, Clay, there’s also the broken fundamental promise of why did people go to vote for Joe Biden? And this is something Democrats do all the time. Republicans… The problem Republicans have is they get elected — and this is generalizations, but we’re talking politics; we’re gonna have to generalize. They get elected promising something and then they don’t deliver what they promise to the base. That’s the problem, the fundamental problem, I think, of Republicans often.

Democrats get elected pretending to be something other than that which they are, though, right? Like Joe Biden, in this case, is saying he’s a unifier, he’s a uniter, he’s not that he is a guy who wants to push through a left-wing agenda and be a spokesperson effectively for the more radical parts of the Democrat apparatus. He was a guy that was gonna be America’s grandpa.

We’re all scared. We’ve all got this covid thing flying around, right? Joe Biden’s a guy you can trust! This whole… Joe Biden is nasty. He says horrible things about his political opponents. He says reckless things in front of the American people as he just did in that speech a couple days ago. His whole pandemic of the unvaccinated line is disgraceful. And he keeps repeating it. He is the opposite of what he pretended to be, to be elected in a once in-a-century pandemic situation. And I think people are recognizing that.

CLAY: I don’t know how he climbs out of it. We had this discussion, Buck, you’ll remember, in the summer when we had the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. And the overall consensus at that point in time was that foreign policy doesn’t typically drive American approval ratings. But I do think it was an important tipping point for Joe Biden because Afghanistan, for many people, reflected the overall incompetence of the Biden administration.

Whether it was at the border, whether it was the murder rate, whether it’s now with covid, the most interesting thing I think in this Quinnipiac poll, Buck, is for the most part Joe Biden is now substantially underwater when it comes to his response to covid. That’s been the only thing that has been his saving grace so far was that there were enough people in America who trusted him on covid.

Now he’s lost there too. There is not one single thing that Joe Biden is doing right now of a significant magnitude that is positively reviewed. Whether it’s immigration, the border, covid, his domestic agenda, all of it has been soundly rejected. So I don’t know. There’s a good conversation we were having with Monica Crowley in this hour. I don’t know.

And I think it’s an important historical analogy that actually has some relevance, as opposed to the historical analogies that people like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have been using about the Civil War to describe our current time. Bill Clinton in 1994, he got shellacked. He came back from it. Same thing happened to Barack Obama in the midterms in was 2008, and he came back from it — and I don’t know, in 2010, I guess.

I don’t know that Biden has anywhere near the political skill to be able to come back from what seems to be a clear shellacking that is coming towards him in November. And so basically at that point we just sit and do nothing for two years because there’s nothing that’s gonna get through the House, there’s nothing that’s gonna get through the Senate, and I don’t think Biden has the political muscle to be able to build himself back up like Clinton and Obama did.

BUCK: It’s like he’s on the high-speed train to Lame Duckville. It’s like he’s getting there before anybody thought could have even been possible, because if you are the Republicans in a newly earned majority — let’s say in the House and the Senate, which is very possible — why would you want to do anything that would fall into the Democrat agenda?

Sure, you’re gonna do the basic stuff that they do in Capitol Hill and D.C., but why all of a sudden would you want to give him the lifeline of triangulation? I think that’s what you’re getting at, right, that there could be some political skills that others would have to take a more moderate path? They’ve already decided that they would use, say, infrastructure spending as a club with which they were going to say, essentially:

“This is popular. So if you want this thing, you have to give us a massive spending package on top of it,” right? They’ve decided that this was gonna be a leverage point instead of a bipartisan measure. Why would Republicans give them the win? I think that there’s no reason to believe that Joe Biden’s gonna be in a better place going forward, although I think that one of the aspects of this we have to remember, things are so bad now that they will be, I think, on the upswing for Biden going into the fall. I hate saying that aloud, but I think it’s true. Just because, how much worse is it really gonna get?

CLAY: Covid can’t be this — I mean, let’s knock on wood, right. But covid can’t be this bad in the fall of 2022 as it is right now.

BUCK: And the economy, people will be saying, “Oh, it’s on the upswing! Oh, it’s getting better.” Don’t underestimate the shamelessness of the libs when it comes to staying whatever they have to in order to get power. Look what they did with Joe Biden the first place, look who they made president, and now you think they’re gonna start being honest about the fact that he’s terrible at this?

Of course not. So I think that even though it feels like right now they have very few cards to play, they’re hiding things up their sleeves. They’ll cheat, they’ll lie, they’ll steal, they’ll do whatever they gotta do. So we have a formidable — and I also, Clay, I don’t want us to take the House, the Senate. It has to be annihilation. This has to be repudiation of the Democrat ideology over the last two years or else we have underperformed as conservatives and as a party.

CLAY: I think so, because the message that’s going to be sent is going to be a massive one — and it does. It needs to be a red wave, needs to be a shellacking.