President Joe Biden and his people love to crow about how they received more votes than anyone in history. They take that to mean they have a serious mandate to do anything they want. However, Democrats want the next term in the White House. While there’s reason to believe Biden won’t be running then, there are other candidates including Vice President Kamala Harris.

That means they need to listen to the public to some degree, especially as they’re claiming that our system of government really is about majority rules.

Well, if that’s so, the majority think the president leaves a lot to be desired.

The number of Americans seeing crime as an extremely serious problem in the United States is at a more than 20-year high, President Joe Biden is underwater in trust to handle it and broad majorities in an ABC News/Washington Post poll favor alternative crime-fighting strategies to address it.

A sweeping 75% in the national survey said violent crime would be reduced by increasing funding to build economic opportunities in poor communities. Sixty-five percent said the same about using social workers to help police defuse situations with people having emotional problems.

These measures, aimed at underlying causes of crime, are most apt to have been seen as effective, by substantial margins, of five that were tested. Among the others, 55% think increasing funding for police departments would reduce violent crime, 51% say the same about stricter enforcement of existing gun laws and 46% say so about stricter gun-control laws.

In other words, it seems that the majority believe there should be a combination of approaches used to reduce crime, both short term and long term. While social workers being deployed sounds good in theory, I’m not sure it’s workable, but I get the idea here. Why arrest or shoot people who are really just in need of help?

Again, I’m not sure that’s workable, but I don’t find the idea objectionable on the surface.

Yet how bad is the public’s trust in Biden to fix the situation?

Politically, just 38% of adults overall approve of how Biden is handling the issue of crime in this country, with 48% disapproving. That said, Americans divide almost exactly evenly on which political party they trust more to handle crime — 36% pick the Republicans, 35% the Democrats, about the average difference between the parties on this question in polls going back to 1990. Twenty percent volunteered that they don’t trust either party on crime.

That’s really not good for a veteran politician early in his presidency.

What’s more, that’s not the only area where the president is lacking support for his policy proposals. After all, a good portion of his attempts to address crime involve gun control, and the public isn’t really fond of that, either. Let’s revisit that last paragraph from the first blockquote for a second.

These measures, aimed at underlying causes of crime, are most apt to have been seen as effective, by substantial margins, of five that were tested. Among the others, 55% think increasing funding for police departments would reduce violent crime, 51% say the same about stricter enforcement of existing gun laws and 46% say so about stricter gun-control laws.

That 51 percent that calls for stricter enforcement of existing gun laws sounds kind of familiar. In fact, that’s pretty close to what Rassmussen found in a poll we reported on earlier this week.

Maybe it’s me, but that seems like a number we can trust.

Plus, once again, we have less than a majority supporting new gun control laws, despite the president’s continued insistence that we need such things. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that this continued anti-gun push will cause serious problems for Democrats in the 2022 midterms as well as in 2024.

It sure won’t break my heart.