It’s not necessarily that Afghanistan is a top policy issue for most U.S. voters. Since April, a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos survey regularly tracking the 20 top issues Americans think are facing the country found foreign conflicts and terrorism consistently rank towards the bottom of the list. Virtually no Americans cited Afghanistan as an important problem for the nation.

Still, the disastrous withdrawal had an impact on voters’ perception of Biden’s performance that is proving powerful and difficult to reverse. “Afghanistan was like the dark cloud over Pigpen,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, referring to the character in the Charlie Brown cartoon. “It cemented a sense of lingering weakness over the president that he couldn’t shake off, because the underlying realities are there. Americans weren’t saying, ‘I’m so worried about the plight of the Afghan people.’ They were saying, ‘I’m worried about the plight of America.’” The Afghanistan withdrawal formed the foundation of a portrait of incompetence that would just become more detailed as the domestic and economic crises piled up.

“All you have to do is show people a graph of his approval ratings and how they literally just went off a cliff,” Congressman Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who served four tours in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps told POLITICO. “That’s when we went underwater. It was that event. There has never been a more significant drop in his approval ratings than from the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And, sadly, he’s never recovered.”