How declining gas prices may be boosting President Biden's popularity

Yahoo Finance columnist Rick Newman details how lower gas prices are correlating with President Biden's approval rating finally going back up.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: The White House today releasing a summary of what they've done to try and support and grow the economy. They're calling it the Biden-Harris economic blueprint. Earlier, we spoke with Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. He told us why he thinks this plan is necessary.

JARED BERNSTEIN: Well, I guarantee you, if you read through this blueprint, you're going to learn a lot about things we've done that are new policies to you because either, like me, you forgot about them, or you never knew about them in the first place.

DAVE BRIGGS: So with all the legislation in there and falling gas prices and what's fueled a bit of an uptick in Biden's approval ratings, Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman here with that. Rick, you can only go up from the 30% or so that he was at. But he's in the low 40s now. How big a deal are the decline in gas prices?

RICK NEWMAN: It's everything. And with all respect to Jared Bernstein, most Americans don't really care about those-- whatever's in that blueprint. They care about prices, and they care about gas prices and food prices and rent. And the story here, of course, is pretty good for Biden. I mean, we've seen a remarkable decline in-- particularly in oil and gasoline prices since June. I don't think we've ever seen gasoline prices fall this fast. And correspondingly, Biden's approval rating has ticked up. By my numbers, it bottomed out at 38% in July. And it's now around 44%.

Now, 44% is probably not high enough for the Democrats to prevail in the midterms, which are now just eight weeks away. Biden probably needs to be closer to 48 and maybe 50%. But he is heading in that direction. So we've got kind of an interesting horse race here. And it's between the pace of inflation and what voters think about prices.

So the real question is, will gas prices and other prices keep coming down at the rate they have been? And if they do, that's definitely good news for Democrats. It's just not clear whether it will be enough for them to hold on to the House, which is the really hard target in the midterm elections.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And Rick, to your point, I don't know how many people plan on reading, especially regular Americans, plan on reading all 58 pages of this economic blueprint. So what do you think is actually going to perhaps make the difference? Outside of the prices, what people see on the wallet or those three-foot high gas prices, what is actually going to be the real game changer here for [INAUDIBLE]

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, there was one-- right. There was one poll that caught my interest this week. It was an NPR Marist poll. In July, they ran the same poll and they asked voters what is the biggest concern in terms of how you're going to vote in the midterm elections. 37% said inflation.

And when they asked the question just two months later, that had fallen to 30%. And the other big issue, the number two issue, is abortion, which is not something we cover all the time on Yahoo Finance. But that's obviously a huge deal, given that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer.

So if inflation keeps going down as a voter concern, and abortion ticks up as a voter concern, that is, I think, unambiguously good news for Democrats. But that doesn't mean that's going to happen. I mean, concerns about abortion could be topping out at 22%. It might just stay there. But this is really up in the air, and I think harder to predict than most elections.