@HTTP Error 404 Here's the thing I don't think many posters here have realized, but which has actually been known for quite some time. Push polling backfires, hard.
Specifically, it backfires if the person being pushed is unable to pull up at some point.
Example:
Politician A, Politician B, and Politician C all get to enjoy the dubious benefits of Push Polling, both have a true approval of around 50%.
Politician A relies entirely on the push polling, doing little to nothing to improve the general attitude of the public and assuming that the narrative of his success will make people like him more. Politician B attempts and fails to pass some key liked bills that while not terribly effectual are rather public. Politician C manages to pass some key legislation which, again, is not terribly effectual but he has managed to do something.
So, what would the results be for each?
In reverse order, Politician C would have the push-polling become reality, the combination of the successful bill passing and a constructed narrative would allow someone on the edge of approval, or even slightly below it, to be considerably more well-liked.
Where things get interesting is B and A. So, if a successful bill passing results in a bump, surely a failed one is a net neutral, right? Nope. The failure to pass bills gets remembered in the general consensus, and the result is an alienation of the vote. People just view the alleged 'supporters' of Politician B as idiots. It creates a net drop in approval, usually about equal to that politician's share of the Independent vote. Still, the push-polling does something and maintains support among the politician's base generally. This is where Biden was kinda treading water at Pre-Afghanistan.
But what about the third, the one most analogous to the Biden Admin? This is where the fun is. The third option has less historical analogy since basically everyone in politics agrees it's a bad idea. That is not to say we don't have any analogy. What occurs is a self-reinforcing death spiral. The lack of any substantive policy or addition of major crises without substantive policy results in an alienation of the Politicians base. A sort of cognitive dissonance which makes them turned off by the politician, which results in them disliking the politician, which results in a lower approval, which causes the push poll number to drop, which -reinforces the cognitive dissonance-.
Basically, approval drops because approval drops. And you can probably see why that becomes a problem.
This is why Push-polling is generally avoided outside of a specific push for a specific policy or to get a candidate in office. For the latter, standard, if unethical, practice is to slowly reduce the push-polling over a span of 3 months as they do the Politician C route to ensure that their real approval remains where the polling shows.