Forget the midterms. A presidential election in which Joe Biden ran for a second term would turn into an Electoral College bloodbath, according to data in two polling series over the last 24 hours. We’ve been following the Civiqs polling in the states, which has looked bad for months for Biden, and we’ll return to it in a bit.

However, Morning Consult also shows Biden underwater in 44 states, including some surprising blue states — and it may be even worse for Democrats in the midterms because of it:

With less than four months until November’s midterm elections, the political environment has arguably worsened for Democrats as President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings abound across the country, including in states that will be key to his party’s hopes of holding both chambers on Capitol Hill, which face long odds.

Morning Consult Political Intelligence survey data gathered during the second quarter of 2022 shows voters in 44 states are more likely to disapprove than approve of Biden’s job performance, up from 40 states in the first quarter. It leaves the Democratic standard-bearer in a markedly worse position ahead of the midterms than then-President Donald Trump and his party faced in 2018, with attrition among Biden’s base a key factor, along with a comparatively more hostile review from independents and voters on the other side of the aisle.

Between the first and second quarters of this year, Biden’s net approval rating — the share who approve of his job performance minus the share who disapprove — was virtually unchanged in 23 states, and he saw mostly modest declines in most others.

The “modest declines” are worth noting, however:

Over the span of three months, Biden’s net approval rating dropped underwater in Illinois and — for the first time of his presidency — in Washington, Rhode Island and Delaware, the latter of which he has long called home.

Just how bad is it? This comparison should give Democrats the night sweats:

But the way things stand, Biden’s second-quarter approval ratings are inferior to Trump’s four years ago in all but 18 states, including Pennsylvania (39% to 45%), Georgia (42% to 48%), and Arizona (39% to 48%). At this point in 2018, Trump’s net approval rating was underwater in 27 states, compared with 44 states for Biden now.

Not coincidentally, Democrats face tough Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. They also face tough races in Nevada (Biden -19 points in overall job approval), Ohio (-23), Wisconsin (-18), North Carolina (-20), Colorado (-6), and New Hampshire (-15), among others. Remember how Republicans did in the 2018 midterms with Trump’s negatives pulling at them? And that was in a period of relative peace and prosperity.

But Biden’s unpopularity goes well beyond the battleground states. On Morning Consult’s interactive map, almost the entire country has gone red. Even the coasts are now mainly places where Biden has gone underwater. Only California on the West Coast and three states on the Atlantic seaboard show Biden above water at all, a sharp change from a year ago. In fact, using the slider, the tipping point came somewhere between the June 2021 and September 2021 readings in the Morning Consult series — the Afghanistan fiasco, which has become as I predicted the inflection point of a confidence-crisis cascade for Biden.

Of course, we’ve seen this slide coming for months from the Civiqs data, which shows Biden underwater in 48 states rather than 44. Biden’s fallen in deep-blue Hawaii to a 50/38 rating, and in Vermont he’s barely above water at 43/40, while now underwater everywhere else. (A 40/46 in Massachusetts?) Biden only gets to 40% in those three states too, the same number of states in which Biden falls below 20% job approval — North Dakota (19%), West Virginia (17%), and Wyoming (16%).

The bigger problem now for both Biden and Democrats isn’t his job approval ratings, however. It’s Biden’s favorability ratings, which have cratered to a new low in his presidency of 36/58 in the Civiqs poll:

Biden hit lower numbers in the primaries because Democrats weren’t enthusiastic about Biden personally until he won the nomination. Democrats are slowly moving into that position again, going from a peak 90/5 when Biden signed the American Rescue plan in March 2021 to a 77/14 now. Biden has a similar favorability rating from black voters (72/18), and … that’s it. Independents rate his personal favorability at 22/70, although the best he ever did there was a 38/56, and Hispanics now have Biden underwater on personal favorability at 46/48 for the first time. And Biden’s personal rating is above water in only three states — Hawaii, Maryland, and Vermont, and only with a majority in Hawaii.

This is not a president who’s battered by forces out of his control. This is a president who has lost the trust and affection of the electorate through his own incompetency, demagoguery, and blame-shifting lies. If Democrats think that they can avoid this millstone in the midterms, they’re fooling themselves … again.