Polls show women and other reliably Democratic voters have soured on the president’s performance, raising questions about the causes of dissatisfaction.

By Nate Cohn

President Biden’s approval rating among key Democratic constituencies has declined considerably in recent months, eroding or even reversing decades-long patterns in public opinion.

The as-yet-unanswerable question is whether that slide is a momentary dip — a fluke of a tough run of headlines — or a warning sign of even deeper dissatisfaction among Democratic-leaning voters.

A large number of voters — women, young people and those who are Black or Latino — have all soured on Mr. Biden’s performance, according to polls conducted since the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, even while Mr. Biden has retained more of his support among men, college-educated white voters and older voters.

The shifts could be temporary. Perhaps the enactment of the president’s stalled legislative initiatives in Congress would be enough for the president to renew his reputation with Democratic-leaning voters. But for now, the differences in attitudes about Mr. Biden between men and women, young and old, Hispanic and non-Hispanic and perhaps even white and Black have grown unusually small. The pattern defies the decades-long tendency for Democrats to fare better among women than men, and among the young than the old.

There are few clues to help analysts understand these striking shifts in Mr. Biden’s ratings among reliably Democratic constituencies. But the shift can be interpreted in two ways, each with very different political consequences heading into the midterm election next year.

The best case for Democrats is that this is nothing more than an unusual response to an unusually unfavorable news environment, in which general dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden over the chaos in Afghanistan and the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus temporarily spilled across demographic fault lines.

But Mr. Biden’s weakness could also be interpreted as a continuation of electoral trends that surprised and disappointed Democrats in November. Mr. Biden fared unexpectedly poorly last year among many of the same groups he is struggling with now. It raises the more alarming possibility for Democrats that recent events have revealed a broader problem — they are losing support among voting groups they generally take for granted.

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