Biden’s empathy shapes policy, but some voters don’t feel it

Sitting aboard Air Force One last year, President Joe Biden was scanning the newspaper and spotted a ghostly photo of a child’s swing set engulfed in raw sewage. He didn’t just sigh or shake his head. Upon landing back in Washington, he ordered longtime aide Steve Ricchetti to phone the White House infrastructure coordinator.

By August, Lowndes County, Alabama, had a $10 million grant to fix the problem with money from the 2021 infrastructure law. And administration officials told the community the money came at the president’s insistence.

But here’s the rub for Biden:

A majority of voters in Alabama and across the U.S. don’t believe he cares about people like them. Nor do they trust his ability to manage a sprawling federal government that often moves at a sluggish pace.

This perception has made it harder for Biden to sell his plans for the economy and make his case to voters around the country that he deserves a second term in an all-but-declared reelection campaign.

“If you go and you walk in some of these folks’ yards, the kids are running outside and they’re running in sewage,” says Mitch Landrieu, the White House infrastructure coordinator. “These are the people that the president wants to touch.”

For all of that, however, 53% of voters in the midterm elections said Biden didn’t care about people like them, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate. That belief about

Biden — a president known to commiserate with grieving families and offer to phone children who want puppies — is a reflection of how people judge leaders through a rigidly partisan lens. About 9 in 10 Republicans say Biden is indifferent to them; roughly that many Democrats see him as empathetic.

“To Republicans, Biden has no redeeming traits,” said Stanford University professor Shanto Iyengar. “Not only are evaluations of incumbents completely polarized, cues like personal traits matter less.”

The broader public is also skeptical that Biden, at 80 years old, can oversee the

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Political Brief

Governor Newsom Announces Awards of More Than $825 Million to Build Affordable Housing Through Accelerated Approval Process

GOV.CA.GOV | CONTRIBUTED

To continue expanding the state’s affordable housing stock and increase capacity for additional climate-smart infill housing, Governor Gavin Newsom today announced the first funding awards under a new streamlined application process aimed at accelerating the development of new projects while saving time and money at the local level.

What you need to know: Approximately 58 communities across California were awarded more than $825.5 million to build 9,550 homes as part of a new funding approval process that eliminates the need for a developer to submit multiple applications. This includes roughly $700 million in funds for multifamily development and $125 million for infill development. Today’s funding announcement will ultimately benefit an estimated 187,500 people over the total lifetime of all projects combined.

Why it’s important: The application process to receive state housing funding in California was needlessly complex, and time consuming, resulting in delayed projects and extra cost. Under Governor Newsom, this process has been overhauled. Now, what previously required four separate applications has been narrowed down to just one submission.

What Governor Newsom said: “As we demand more housing to be built at the local level, it is incumbent upon the state to reimagine and modernize our own approval process,” said Governor Newsom. “State applications that were once redundant, and overly bureaucratic, are now streamlined to ensure projects are not stalled in an endless