We’ve been covering how Joe Biden’s approval ratings have completely cratered, particularly when it comes to his handling of the economy. Earlier today we noted how his ratings have taken another hit, especially among independents.

Now, Biden has officially hit perhaps one of the worst measures that you can hit — that’s the “Worse than Jimmy Carter” measure. Historically, Carter has always represented the lowest of the low when you’re talking about the economy because of the horrible inflation he faced at the time and his failure to do anything effective to address it. He also made things worse with his “malaise speech” — a speech where he said there was a crisis in confidence.

A new CNN poll is finding that Biden’s numbers are now worse than Carter’s at the same time. When even CNN is noting it, you know how bad it is.

In the latest CNN/SSRS poll, Biden comes in with a 44% approval rating to 55% disapproval rating among registered voters on his economic performance. This makes for a -9 point net approval rating. The average of all polls taken in December is quite similar with Biden at -13 points on the economy.

To put that in perspective, the average president at this point in the last 44 years (since we have been polling on the topic) had a net economic approval rating of +5 points. That means Biden’s is 18 points worse than the average.

By comparison:

Carter’s economic net approval rating of -8 points in an early January 1978 CBS News/New York Times poll was the lowest around this point in a presidency before Biden’s -13 points. The economy, and particularly inflation, was listed as the nation’s top problem in a late October 1977 Gallup poll.

Jimmy Carter lost badly in 1980 as a result.

As we previously noted, the recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that only 28 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of inflation, while 69 percent disapproved. Wholesale prices in November also rose at the quickest pace on record, increasing 9.6 percent over the past 12 months, when it was estimated to be at 9.2 percent. That’s the biggest annual PPI gain on record. Even Democratic pollsters were warning Democrats they needed to quickly concentrate on kitchen table issues or they could face their doom as a party and not just in the midterms.

Meanwhile, in the effort to go full-blown Jimmy Carter 2.0, Joe Biden did a redux of the “malaise speech” with his fear porn COVID speech where he warned America about a “winter of severe illness and death” because of the unvaccinated, continuing to be divisive and antagonistic.

Now, if he’s going to fully follow through on following Carter, he has to end up being a one-termer. But what makes him even worse, even beyond the numbers, is that he doesn’t seem to care that his policies hurt people, he’s just always right — in his mind — no matter what. At least Carter seemed to care. Now, I suppose one might think that once he’s hit Carter level, he could only go up from there. But given Biden’s ability to always go lower, I don’t think I can bet on that.