Opinion | Can Joe Biden Recover?

This was a good week for anyone enthused about relitigating the 2020 election. First there was new evidence, reported in a new book about the Biden family from the Politico writer Ben Schreckinger and in an Insider story on an abortive Libya-related influence operation, suggesting the famous Hunter Biden emails were real and indicating how much Hunter’s influence-peddling depended on proximity to his father. The Twitter and Facebook decisions to censor The New York Post’s election-season version of the Hunter Biden story looked partisan and illiberal at the time; now they look worse.

Then along with that spur to conservative frustration there was a new revelation for Trump-fearers: the exposure of the entirely insane memo that the conservative legal scholar John Eastman wrote explaining how Mike Pence could supposedly invalidate Joe Biden’s election. This was presumably the basis for Donald Trump’s futile demand that Pence do exactly that, and it’s understandably grist for the “coup next time” fears that already attend Trump’s likely return to presidential politics.

But sometimes looking backward can obscure where we are right now. And that’s a place where few Democrats expected to be when Biden took office with his party in control of government, vaccinations ramping up and hopes of an economic boomlet growing. It’s not just that the president’s approval rating is dropping toward Trump-like levels (and falling sharply among the minority voters who surprised liberals with their Republican shift in 2020). Trump’s own approval may be rising, a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll suggests, to a point where Americans think at least as favorably of the ex-president as of the current one.

Along with any worries about Trump stealing the next presidential election, then, Democrats should recognize the possibility that he might simply win it.

What’s gone wrong for Biden is a combination of bad luck, bad choices and inherent weakness. The bad luck is mostly about Covid itself, whose Delta-variant surge no president could have easily controlled. That may be the most important drag on Biden’s approval rating — which started to decline in earnest around the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restored a mask recommendation. This, in turn, points to the most optimistic take on Biden’s situation: that his political fortunes are simply tied to the coronavirus and will recover rapidly when — by spring, God willing — death rates finally drop away.

The more pessimistic take, though, recognizes all the places where Biden’s own efforts have gone astray. He has done popular things incompetently: The retreat from Afghanistan was overdue and had the public’s support, but our manifest unpreparedness for the Taliban’s sweep into power meant that Biden ceded any political benefit he might have gained from pushing the withdrawal through.

He has also let liberal confidence lead him somewhat astray on key issues: His big…