The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will hold terrible, often fatal, consequences for many people. Interpreters, who assisted Western forces. Journalists, who provided information to their people. Women and girls, regardless of their actions. But, from a political betting perspective, the most notable consequence is a far less important one: It’s been an awful week for Joe Biden.

Smarkets allow us to bet on Joe Biden’s approval rating on his one year anniversary (of inauguration, not election). FiveThirtyEight keeps a weighted polling average of this polling, which Smarkets uses to settle bets. The options range from net negative approval (roughly 3/1), up to 10% positive (2/1), up to 20% positive (5/2), and better than 20% net positive (13/1). NB: All odds are in an illiquid market and have wide spreads.

I’ve long been skeptical that Biden rebounding to over 20% net approval was ever plausible, but the prospect of him sinking into the negative range is looking increasingly likely.

Since taking office Biden has had reasonably good, if slowly fading, ratings. Keeping at least half the country happy with you isn’t easy in these polarised times, and that polarisation makes it less likely his approval will fall off a cliff (though nothing is impossible).

This is reinforced by the polling on recent Presidents, which FiveThirtyEight helpfully also keeps. Very noticeably, the last decade has seen far more stable polling than previously. All this makes Biden deeply unlikely to surge to 20%+ net approvals unless a dramatic event happens to reverse his fortunes.

But what about the opposite? Could the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, complete with photos of a Chinook collecting people from the roof of the US Embassy, push Biden’s ratings down into the lowest outcome on this market?

Put simply: Yes, that’s very possible. Even before this week, Biden’s trend was downhill and pretty reliably so. If you simply extrapolate his decline from late-March to early August (before Afghanistan made headlines) until January 20^th 2022 (the date the market is settled on) he was already ‘on course’ for a -3% rating.

It is true that polarisation might protect him at some point from falling below a certain level, and that Afghanistan may well be long forgotten in another 5 months time. It’s also true that events in Afghanistan may not hurt him much at all: Withdrawal was the preferred option of most of the US public (though perhaps not carried out like this). But recent Presidents haven’t tended to get more popular as time goes by, and Biden hasn’t had any sustained periods of increasing popularity so far in his term. This is a value bet probably at anything 2/1 or longer, maybe even at 6/4 or longer.

Pip Moss

Pip Moss posts on Political Betting as Quincel. He has bets on Biden’s approval being negative at 4/1, and has laid bets on it clearing 20% positive at 5/1. You can follow him on Twitter at @PipsFunFacts