CLAY: I don’t know if you saw this, Buck, but the numbers that came out in the most recent Civiqs poll, this came out this morning, and it’s I think emblematic of the fact that it’s occurring right now. New Civiqs poll: Joe Biden’s job approval has fallen now to 35% with a 55% disapproval rate. Independents are approving of Joe Biden right now at a rate of 23%. Let me repeat that again.

The independent voter approval rating for Joe Biden, 23%, and 64% disapproval. In the Senate battleground states — Buck, you and I have talked quite a bit about flipping the Senate back to Republican control. Joe Biden’s approval rating right now in the state of Georgia, 32%. Herschel Walker has to win. Whoever is the Republican nominee for the governorship has to beat Stacey Abrams.

Arizona, 34% approval. Pennsylvania, 34% approval. Nevada — we talked with Adam Laxalt, who is running for Senate there — 35% approval. Wisconsin, 38%. These numbers are unlike anything we have ever seen for a Democratic president, especially ’cause we know the polls tend to be biased in his favor, and they’re still this bad.

BUCK: Obama was polarizing early on with policies, right? Obama was effectively giving the left and the more socialist wing of the Democrat Party what it wanted in his first term. Obamacare obviously became the huge fight. But you could see how Republicans and maybe even independents — although we’d have to go back and look at the numbers — were very opposed to him. But he was delivering for Democrats, right?

That’s a very important component of what he was doing early on in his term. Wasn’t a good idea, bad for the country. Everybody knows how I feel about that and you feel like that but that’s not the point. The point is he was delivering for Democrats. Fast-forward to Joe Biden, Clay. He’s not delivering for anybody. This is the big challenge that we see for this administration. It’s not just he has done things, right? Obamacare polarizing: 50-50, or 52-48 or whatever the numbers were doing when you looked at them early on.

With Joe Biden, nobody likes inflation. Nobody likes high crime rates. Nobody wants a war in Europe. Nobody wants a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Even the left sees this stuff and goes… Look, they want their socialism, their Big Government. They want the big-spending Biden agenda. They want all this stuff, but he hasn’t even delivered for the base. He’s refused to turn back toward the sanity of the center and do what’s best for the country.

He’s not pulling a Clintonian triangulation yet. But he can’t even say to them, “Hey, guys, back me up. I’m giving you everything we want. I’ve got Biden agenda through. I’m giving you the Green New Deal. I’m getting amnesty through the Senate” or whatever. He’s doing the bare minimum in terms of accomplishing what the socialists want on the left and at the same time everybody who’s just looking at this objectively — which is why the independent numbers I think are so clear, Clay — are saying they got nothing to celebrate. There’s nothing to point to here.

CLAY: Twenty-three percent independent approval, and this is the underlying reason why all of a sudden covid has vanished because — and we’ll talk about this when we come back at the top of the next hour. I want with you, as we go into this break and start to think about it: What is the pitch for Joe Biden? Did you see yesterday — I’m sure you did, Buck — the video of Biden walking. It looks like he was saying, “Don’t fall down!

“Don’t fall down!” as he walked across the White House grounds by himself in that oversized, ridiculous black mask that he’s been wearing for a couple of years now. Outdoors, nobody within a hundred feet of him, he’s wearing a mask. Tonight in the House Chamber for the State of the Union address, he’s not going to be wearing a mask. So for all those people out there who are screaming, “Oh, we’re the party of science! We’re gonna take covid seriously,” how do you explain Joe Biden in that big, oversize mask walking by himself?

Buck, honestly, it’s difficult to watch Joe Biden even walk because I legitimately expect for him to fall at any point. He is that frail. Certainly, we’ve seen him already fall down going up the stairs on his Air Force One stair climb. When he’s walking across… I saw somebody — it might have been our buddy Jesse Kelly — say that Biden was walking like he was trying to pretend he wasn’t drunk.

After being out golfing all day and he’s coming back home, and he knows his wife is looking at him out the window, and he’s trying to walk. He walked like SpongeBob SquarePants, if you have kids, and now suddenly he’s not gonna have a mask on at tonight’s State of the Union?

What’s going on there? How can the party of science say, “Mask up outdoors” literally yesterday, and today they’re gonna say, “Well, you no longer need a mask indoors?”