A national poll released by NBC News yesterday shows a stunning percentage of Americans think we’re on the wrong track.

As my colleague Nick Arama pointed out yesterday, this is the very definition of bad news piling up for the Democrats.

But the poll also showed a shocking number — that 72 percent of Americans think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. NBC said this was only the sixth time in history that it’s been over 70 percent and that when it happened in an election year, it wasn’t good for the party in power.

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More bad signs for Biden and the Democrats? Sixty-one percent said their family income was dropping behind the cost of living. Seventy percent thought that America had become too polarized. That’s up 34 percent from a decade ago.

To make matters worse, the GOP overall has a higher favorability than the Democratic Party and the poll shows that Kamala Harris is the most disliked politician on a list that includes both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But Harris isn’t the one leading the Democratic Party, nor is she the person in charge. It’s Joe Biden.

None of the numbers in this NBC News poll are good. Then again, none of the numbers in their approval rating poll last week were good, either. The numbers are consistently showing Biden down in all the fields that matter to voters at the moment.

All of the bad numbers are stemming from the Biden administration’s inability to form a coherent message or display any sort of leadership. Their legislative priorities have been all over the place, and the one issue they really put any major focus on, the voting bill, was dead on arrival. Yet they continued to push it while the rest of the country wondered if they’d be able to get gas and groceries that week.

Now we’re facing another potential global crisis in eastern Europe and the government is making decisions that are eerily familiar – troop deployments, warnings to evacuate the region, etc. – instead of showing any sort of meaningful leadership on the issue of Russian aggression. Of course, Biden insisted that he was tough on Putin, remember?

Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 21, 2020

I’m not sure what going “toe-to-toe” with Putin looks like in Biden’s mind, but what we’re seeing now… isn’t it.

Dig into the numbers on just about any recent poll you can find (like those linked at the RealClearPolitics page for Biden’s approval) and you’ll see that on just about every social issue, the Democrats are understandably ahead. But on the issues affecting voters on a day-to-day basis, like the economy, job market, inflation, etc., the Republicans have a healthy advantage. Those issues aren’t just going to disappear either.

And with all that is the Russia and Afghanistan issue. Biden’s foreign policy has been a failure so massive even the Biden-friendly media couldn’t ignore them. If you look at the poll numbers, his decline in approval really began with Afghanistan. Foreign policy is not the Democrats’ strong suit, but no one has been this bad since Jimmy Carter, and I think Jimmy Carter is probably preferable to Biden at this point.

On top of all this, mind you, the Republicans don’t really have a clear leader. There is no one out there truly guiding the party. Their fiercest critics will say Trump is, but it’s really more vying for Trump’s base than it is taking cues from him. But the Democrats’ ineptitude has been so obvious the Republicans don’t really need a single, clear voice right now. They are content to just point and say “See?!” and the voters just nod along.

Biden is finishing the work of his old boss, Barack Obama, who very nearly wiped out the Democratic Party with his arrogance in 2008 to 2016. But Biden is just more efficient, doing so in one term rather than two.