President Biden’s approval rating started to tank in the middle of 2021. This timing wasn’t unusual; historically, new presidents have enjoyed a honeymoon period of a few months before the public sours.
Washington
Analysis | The impossibility of telling Joe Biden he can’t win
It has since become very clear that the decline in approval was real. It is also clear that Biden’s position in his bid for reelection is shaky. But Biden’s approach to that concern — expressed loudly and vehemently by members of his own party in recent weeks — is to once again dismiss the polls as inaccurate or to cherry-pick the numbers he wants.
Those in the Democratic Party hoping to replace Biden with someone better positioned to win are obstructed, in part, by this obstinance from Biden. But they are obstructed, too, because while Biden’s position is historically weak, polling doesn’t (and perhaps can’t) show someone else doing demonstrably better.
At his news conference on Thursday, Biden repeatedly dismissed questions about dropping out of the race or about his ability to win.
“How accurate does anybody think the polls are these days?” Biden said at one point. He noted that some polls showed him winning, some losing, some tied. (In the past few days, in fact, polls from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist University showed Biden with a statistically insignificant lead over Trump; The Washington Post’s poll with ABC News and Ipsos showed him tied.) The polling data, Biden said, was “premature because the campaign really hasn’t even started.”
At another point, he tried to suggest that his position wasn’t as bad as it seems.
“There are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents,” he said, “who had lower numbers than I have now later in the campaign. So there’s a long way to go in this campaign.”
This is not a good way to illustrate his point. If he’s talking about support in presidential polling, it is true that other incumbent presidents have seen lower support later in the campaign, according to 538’s average of polls. Those presidents were Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980. They are not role models for electoral success.
Several presidential candidates have seen lower support in mid-July than Biden does now. But most went on to lose. The exceptions were Bill Clinton in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2016, both running against unpopular opponents with strong third-party candidates in the mix. As Biden is now.
If Biden was talking about his approval numbers, here, too, history isn’t kind. The only presidents with lower approval in July of an election year either lost reelection or saw their parties lose the White House in November.
Beyond the specifics, analogies to past contests are fraught. For one thing, there simply haven’t been many presidential elections, especially in an era with modern polling and certainly none like this year’s, pitting a former president against the current one. So we look at the polls.
Near the end of the news conference, Biden was asked whether he would step aside for a candidate better able to win in November.
“No,” he replied, “unless they” — meaning his advisers — “came back and said, there’s no way you can win. Me.” He shifted to a conspiratorial whisper. “No one’s saying that. No poll says that.”
That is true. No poll says he can’t win and no poll says that some other candidate definitely will win. As we noted on Thursday, this is in part because the race will likely come down to a handful of swing states that will be determined by slim margins. And polls aren’t effective at sussing out those sorts of small differences.
The NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll mentioned above included another battery of questions pitting Trump against various Democrats. As has been the case with other similar polls recently (including ours and one from CNN), Biden doesn’t do much differently against Trump than other candidates.
Those included in Marist’s poll were Vice President Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In each case, the Democrat ran even with or slightly ahead of Trump. Interestingly, in every non-Biden matchup, some of those who said they planned to support Biden in a Biden-Trump matchup defected to Trump when he was running against another Democrat. But some of Trump’s support flipped to the Democrat. The effect, then, was that swapping candidates was a wash.
Where the non-Biden candidates had an edge was among the sizable segment of respondents who viewed both Biden and Trump unfavorably. Asked whom they preferred in a Biden-Trump matchup, those double-haters (as the vernacular has it) preferred Trump by four points. But they preferred Harris by five points and the less well-known Newsom and Whitmer by nine points and 14 points, respectively.
Yet, overall, Newsom and Whitmer still ran about as well against Trump as Biden. Perhaps, as Biden suggested, their position would shift over the course of a campaign as voters learned more about them. Or perhaps it wouldn’t. Maybe they, too, would end up battling for fewer than 100,000 votes in the Upper Midwest the way Hillary Clinton and Biden did.
That’s why Biden is immobile. He is convinced that he has overcome doubts in the past, particularly in the 2020 Democratic primary. He believes that other incumbents have been in difficult shape before rebounding. He knows that polling continues to give him a shot, however distant. And he is advantaged by the fact that polling can’t replicate all of the effects of a campaign — neither the potential of a surge in popularity for a governor prosecuting an effective case against Trump nor the result of an incumbent taking a tumble at an October campaign rally.
Washington
Widespread Verizon outage prompts emergency alerts in Washington, New York City
Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services.
The nation’s largest wireless carrier said that its “engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly.”
Verizon’s statement came after a swath of social media comments directed at Verizon, with users saying that their mobile devices were showing no bars of service or “SOS,” indicating a lack of connection.
Verizon, which has more than 146 million customers, appears to have started experiencing services issues around 12:00 p.m. ET, according to comments on social media site X.
Two hours later, Verizon posted an update on social media, saying that its engineers were “continuing to address today’s service interruptions,” but did not say if a specific reason for the outage had been identified or when it could be resolved.
“We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible,” the company said.
Despite those efforts, shortly after 4:00 p.m. ET, Verizon issued a third statement that contained little new information. The company said teams were “on the ground actively working to fix today’s service issue.”
Users had initially reported problems with Verizon’s competitors, T-Mobile and AT&T, as well. But both companies said they were not experiencing any service problems.
“T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected,” a spokesperson told NBC News. “However, due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.”
A spokeswoman for AT&T also said the company’s network was “operating normally.”
In Washington, D.C., the District’s official emergency notification system sent out a message to residents saying that the Verizon outage was “nationwide.”
“If you have an emergency and can not connect using your Verizon Wireless device, please connect using a device from another carrier, a landline, or go to a police district or fire station to report the emergency,” the AlertDC system told recipients.
New York City’s Office of Emergency Management also said it was aware of the outage without mentioning Verizon by name. The city said it was “working closely with our partners” to review the outage and “assess any potential effects on city agencies & essential services.”
Washington
Vance to meet Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington on Wednesday
People walk along a street in downtown of Nuuk, Greenland, on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026.
Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
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Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
NUUK, Greenland — Along the narrow, snow-covered main street in Greenland’s capital, international journalists and camera crews stop passersby every few meters (feet) asking them for their thoughts on a crisis which Denmark’s prime minister has warned could potentially trigger the end of NATO.

Greenland is at the center of a geopolitical storm as U.S. President Donald Trump is insisting he wants to own the island — and the residents of its capital Nuuk say it is not for sale. Trump said he wants to control Greenland at any cost and the White House has not ruled out taking the island by force.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance will meet Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart Vivian Motzfeldt in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the Arctic island, which is a semiautonomous territory of the United States’ NATO ally Denmark.
Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told The Associated Press in Nuuk that she hoped American officials would get the message to “back off.”
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told a news conference in the Danish capital Copenhagen on Tuesday that, “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.”

Greenland is strategically important because as climate change causes the ice to melt, it opens up the possibility of shorter trade routes to Asia. That also could make it easier to extract and transport untapped deposits of critical minerals which are needed for computers and phones.
Trump also said he wants the island to expand America’s security and has cited what he says is the threat from Russian and Chinese ships as a reason to control it.
But both experts and Greenlanders question that claim.
“The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market,” Lars Vintner, a heating engineer told AP. He said he frequently goes sailing and hunting and has never seen Russian or Chinese ships.
His friend, Hans Nørgaard, agreed, adding “what has come out of the mouth of Donald Trump about all these ships is just fantasy.”
Denmark has said the U.S. — which already has a military presence — can boost its bases on Greenland. For that reason, “security is just a cover,” Vintner said, suggesting Trump actually wants to own the island to make money from its untapped natural resources.
Nørgaard told AP he filed a police complaint in Nuuk against Trump’s “aggressive” behavior because, he said, American officials are threatening the people of Greenland and NATO. He suggested Trump was using the ships as a pretext to further American expansion.

“Donald Trump would like to have Greenland, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would like Ukraine and (Chinese President) Xi Jinping would like to have Taiwan,” Nørgaard said.
Mikaelsen, the student, said Greenlanders benefit from being part of Denmark which provides free health care, education and payments during study.
“I don’t want the U.S. to take that away from us,” she said.
Ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and mineral resources said it’s “unfathomable” that the United States is discussing taking over a NATO ally and urged the Trump administration to listen to voices from the Arctic island’s people.
Washington
HIGHLIGHT | Lawrence Dots a Pass to Washington for a 6-Yard TD
DE Dawuane Smoot, LB Foyesade Oluokun, TE Brenton Strange, S Eric Murray, and S Antonio Johnson speak with the media after practice on Thursday ahead of the Wild Card Matchup vs. Bills.
0:00 – 2:28 – DE Dawuane Smoot
2:29 – 6:24 – LB Foyesade Oluokun
6:25 – 9:25 – TE Brenton Strange
9:26 – 11:32 – S Eric Murray
11:33 – 13:46 – S Antonio Johnson
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