Time for yet another measure of Joe Biden’s confidence-crisis cascade, and this one hits right at his strength in 2020. Biden won election in large part over trust in handling the pandemic and ending the chaos around the COVID-19 response. Thirteen months after taking office, voters give Biden a 39/57 rating on his top issue and are moving away from his mandates as well:

DEM VOTERS AND THE CULTURE WARS — Voter opinions about President JOE BIDEN’s handling of the pandemic continue to be an enormous anchor weighing down Democrats: Just 39% of registered voters approve of the job he’s doing, while 57% disapprove.

Democratic governors have been trying to get ahead of pandemic fatigue by lifting mask mandates around the country. The country is moving further and further in that direction. Forty-nine percent of voters want mask mandates removed, while 43% say it is too early for states to rescind their mask mandates.

We’ll get to the “culture war” material in a moment. First, let’s unpack Biden’s standing on the pandemic in this Morning Consult poll data. Only 17% overall rate his handling of COVID-19 as “excellent,” while 41% rate it as “poor.” He gets relatively weak marks from his fellow Democrats (71/26), and you can imagine what Republicans think of his performance (9/87). Among independents, though, Biden gets a disastrous 34/60, with 40% of respondents rating his performance as poor.

Other demos look equally bad. There is hardly any difference between men (39/58) and women (39/56). Young voters (18-34YOs), many of whom are largely dealing with school restrictions in high school and college, give him the worst rating of all the age demos (30/61) — not a good sign for a party that needs youth-vote turnout in the fall. Even more precisely, GenZ-ers (born after 1996) give Biden a 23/65 rating on pandemic management, while Millennials (1981-96) aren’t much more generous (39/54).

Let’s look at a few more demos that matter for Democrats in the midterms:

• Whites: 36/60, 45% poor
• Hispanics: 38/54, 30% poor
• Blacks: 55/40, 16% poor
• Urban: 50/43, 27% poor
• Suburban: 38/59, 41% poor

Those are very bad numbers, especially among black and urban voters. Democrats need massive turnout in both demos to compete in November. None of them appear terribly enthusiastic about Biden or his response to the pandemic now, and that means that the GOTV effort will be Sisyphean at best.

There’s more bad news for Democrats. Biden’s fumbling on the pandemic and the fight over parental rights that he and Merrick Garland exacerbated have turned into a massive cultural inflection point, and Republicans are winning on it. And that’s not just in the Morning Consult data either, but also in Democrats’ private polling:

Democrats’ own research shows that some battleground voters think the party is “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

And the party’s House campaign arm had a stark warning for Democrats: Unless they more forcefully confront the GOP’s “alarmingly potent” culture war attacks, from critical race theory to defunding the police, they risk losing significant ground to Republicans in the midterms. …

The data showed that Democrats could mostly regain the ground lost to Republicans if they offered a strong rebuttal to the political hits. When faced with a “defund the police” attack, for instance, the presenters encouraged Democrats to reiterate their support for police. And on immigration, they said Democrats should deny support for “open borders or amnesty,” and talk about their efforts to keep the border safe.

If Democrats don’t answer Republican hits, the party operatives warned, the GOP’s lead on the generic ballot balloons to 14 points from 4 points — a dismal prediction for Democrats when the GOP only needs to win five seats to seize back the majority. But when voters heard a Democratic response to that hit, Republicans’ edge narrowed back down to 6 points, giving candidates more of a fighting chance, especially since those numbers don’t factor in Democrats going on the offensive.

There’s one big problem with this advice, though — Democrats don’t have a counterargument. Democrats haven’t done anything to “keep the border safe,” and in fact have actively made it a lot more dangerous over the last year through their rhetoric and Biden administration policies. Their support for police is as threadbare as their denials that they ever supported “defund the police” at all. Furthermore, their party’s positioning of progressive DAs that refuse to enforce the law make it clear on the ground what Democrats run by their progressive wing really represent — lawlessness, disorder, and danger on the streets.

And let’s not forget that a six-point Republican edge in the generic ballot would still portend a disastrous red wave in the fall. Democrats need at least a +4 to even hold serve.

The results clearly show that the Biden confidence-crisis cascade is taking his party over the falls with him. This isn’t a messaging problem — it’s a competence problem, a performance problem, and a radical-shift problem. Until Democrats realize that, they’re doomed along with Biden to do nothing but find their floor.