Bidenism is failing. The question is how badly.

Biden has been explicit about taking a different approach to the presidency than Donald Trump did. But my impression is that Biden and his advisers also believed he would be more effective than Barack Obama was, because conservative White voters would feel less threatened by him and congressional Republicans would be more willing to work with a longtime former colleague.

Nope. Biden’s approval rating is about 42 percent, while about 53 percent of likely voters disapprove of him, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average. That’s not much better than Trump’s standing at the same point in his presidency, when about 42 percent approved and 54 percent disapproved. Obama wasn’t as unpopular until the fifth year of his presidency. Inflation is very high right now, but it’s not like conditions were always great during Trump’s tenure. Biden’s ratings are about the same as Trump’s in August 2020, when unemployment was 8.4 percent and more than 1,000 people a day were dying from covid.

Trump’s bad polling didn’t come as much of a surprise, given the way he embraced unpopular policies (repealing Obamacare; a tax cut largely benefiting the wealthy; separating children from their families at the border) and interjected himself into divisive issues, such as his attacks on NFL players who knelt during the national anthem. Trump acted as though he was president of only Red America. In contrast, Biden has pushed popular policies, said little as state-level Republicans pass extreme legislation, such as total bans on abortion, and tried hard to be a unifying figure.

I’m focusing on approval ratings for two reasons. First, because they are one of the few tangible pieces of data that we have across presidencies. Second, because they matter. When presidents become more unpopular, the media covers them more negatively, and other politicians, particularly politicians from their own party, feel freer to criticize them — which tends to make them even more unpopular. Presidential unpopularity creates a self-reinforcing cycle.

But while it’s clear Bidenism is failing, it’s not clear exactly why.

More centrist Democrats argue that the president, particularly early in his term, swung too far to the left. More liberal Democrats argue that Biden is not progressive enough. Others cite the Democratic infighting this past year over Biden’s agenda, the traditional backlash against first-term presidents, covid and, most often, inflation.

What is most tightly correlated with Biden’s decline, however, is not covid deaths or rising prices but the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden basically became more unpopular then and never recovered. And the case that Biden swung too far left has been undermined in recent weeks. In his State of the Union, the president shifted aggressively to the center, but his approval numbers barely budged. Democrats’ recent push to wind down many covid mitigation policies hasn’t resulted in more support for Biden, either.

It’s likely that all of these factors combined hurt Biden — and that it is impossible to isolate the most important one. But trying to understand why Biden is unpopular is still important, because that could offer some guidance to how he could improve his standing. The question has reinvigorated the infighting in the Democratic Party, unified for much of the past year. The party’s left-wing is now aggressively questioning the strategy of the White House and party establishment, with polls suggesting the Democrats could lose badly in the midterms.

Which brings me to a second thing I’m not clear about: Does the failure of Bidenism ensure doom this November?

In 2018 and 2020, Republicans and Trump ran ahead of Trump’s approval rating — the GOP won about 46 percent of the national vote in those elections. That suggested that many conservative-leaning voters who were leery of Trump went ahead and voted Republican anyway, saving the GOP from a total wipeout.

Could the same happen for Biden and the Democrats? Maybe. Biden’s support has plunged among all demographic groups, including Democrats, Black voters and voters under 40. But those three groups in particular don’t include a lot of conservatives. It is possible that many voters who are lukewarm about Biden will ultimately still vote Democratic. With Biden in the low 40s, it’s hard to see Democrats winning the 51 percent or so of the national popular vote that they would need to keep the House and Senate. But there is reason to think they could outperform today’s dire projections.

Ultimately, I wonder whether we have simply entered an era in which presidents are always going to be unpopular. The parties are increasingly divided internally. So the wing of the party that lost the primary — for the Democrats today, that’s younger and more progressive voters — might never be fully satisfied with a president from the same party but opposite wing.

But even if we don’t know exactly why Biden is unpopular and what that means for the future, one thing is clear — emphasizing unity and ducking divisive issues hasn’t worked. The Obama and Biden presidencies have together proved that. And now we’ve learned that being old, White and male doesn’t make this approach any more effective.

Biden tried to be popular and unifying — and is neither. His failings discredit his political approach — and it’s the same one that has dominated the Democratic Party for decades. November will tell us how costly that failure will be to Democrats.