Daily Verse | Isaiah 12:4
“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
    make known among the nations what he has done,
    and proclaim that his name is exalted.

Tuesday’s Reading: Isaiah 13-16

It’s Tuesday and we’re in the home stretch of July already, with August just peeking over the weekend horizon.

More bad news for Team Brandon.

President Joe Biden in June achieved the highest disapproval rating in the history of modern polling. This month, his popularity declined even further.

About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Just 38 percent of Americans approve. Biden’s disapproval has risen and his approval has fallen by a few points in the last month, when he first became the most unpopular commander in chief in recorded history.

Nobody likes Brandon as Resident, not even the corrupt Democrats. He’s a miserable, unaccomplished grifting poser who is in over his head and the heads of his “advisors.” But the whole cabal of leftists, RINOs, and their “conservative” NeverTrump brethren assured us that he would bring dignity back to the office, that he would restore our norms, and that the adults would finally be back in charge.

How are we all liking the return to our norms with the “adults” back in charge?

Voters are blaming Biden for runaway inflation and the poor state of the nation’s economy. Biden’s historically low approval could spell trouble for Democrats ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Some polls suggest that even Democrats and racial minorities are beginning to turn on the embattled president.

Modern presidential approval polling began with Gallup’s surveys during the Harry S. Truman administration. Biden is the least popular president in almost 80 years of public opinion data collection.

But the tweets are nice, are they not?

On the other hand, Republicans are looking poised to recapture the House and Senate.

As the 2022 midterms loom ever closer, Republicans have increased their generic ballot lead by two points in the last fortnight. The latest Rasmussen Reports poll, released Friday, reveals that voters are ready to cast a ballot for Republicans over Democrats by a 10-point margin — 49% to 39%. This is a two-point improvement from the July 9 survey, which had generic Republicans up over Democrats by eight points (47% to 39%). According to Rasmussen, when asked, “If the elections for Congress were held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate or for the Democratic candidate?”—

“49% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 39% would vote for the Democrat. Just four percent (4%) would vote for some other candidate, but another eight percent (8%) are not sure.”

As always, the independent voter wields an enormous amount of power in the elections. “The Republican lead on the congressional ballot is due both to greater GOP partisan intensity and a 17-point advantage among independents.”

But here’s the kicker. While the Republicans hold a strong electoral advantage heading into the midterm elections, evangelicals are learning that they are increasingly ignored by the GOP. The latest example is the gay marriage bill, that passed with support of 47 Republicans.

For all of the media’s hyperventilating about the GOP’s “culture war,” most Republicans show little to no interest in fighting it. In truth, the “culture war” is hopelessly one-sided, pitting tenacious Democrats against irresolute or decadent Republicans. Take Nancy Pelosi’s recent gay marriage bill. It passed in the House of Representatives not in spite of the GOP but in part because of it: 47 Republicans, including members of GOP leadership, joined the Democrats in supporting the bill.

Imagine the cries of horror from the media and the Democratic base if 47 Democrats ever voted for a piece of GOP legislation on a crucial social issue. That’s inconceivable. The Democrats never wave the white flag in the culture war. But the GOP can’t even summon the energy to back Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act. That’s now considered an “extreme” stance by many GOP elites.

The GOP takes our votes for granted but won’t take our opinions seriously because … wait for it … we “have nowhere else to go.”

What makes it easy for Republican leaders and strategists to exploit the religious right without losing it is that Christians have nowhere else to go. They have to content themselves with the crumbs that fall from the GOP table. And because the positions of the Democrats are increasingly outlandish, it takes less and less for a Republican leader to appear like a “culture warrior” against them. The media slaps that moniker on almost any Republican who even slightly deviates from wokeness. But most of those Republicans don’t oppose the LGBTQ movement in principle. They accept the subjectivism underlying it. They just wince at some of its most obvious excesses and balk at the speed of the movement’s unfolding.

That’s another reason why I think that 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. He listened to them and he promised what he would do and he crusaded on behalf of life while in office. His record on LGBTQUERTY issues is less stellar in evangelical circles, but Christians found a champion in Trump. It will be hard for them to ignore him should he choose to run again in 2024.

Even Ron DeSantis is courting evangelicals in Florida, telling a cheering crowd at the Sunshine Summit’s Victory Dinner that, “you got to be ready for battle. So put on the full armor of God.” Whether he’s a genuine Christian or an opportunist, I don’t know, but language like that is red meat for evangelical Christians (see what I did there?).

Evangelical Christians find themselves in a quandary: we want our leaders to fight for righteousness and truth in our culture. We want them to be godly leaders. But the truth is that very few of them are interested in governing that way. They are more interested in the money and how to stay in power.

Our choices in 2024 are going to be very challenging.