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If you hear pundits handicapping a post-SOTU approval bounce for Biden, ignore them [1]

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Date: 2023-02-07  

Take a look at Civiqs tracking of Trump's approval rating during his time in office. His first few months were a little wonky. Then, he appears to get a slight bump from 42% to 44% approval in the months following his Dec. 2017 signing of the GOP tax cuts for the wealthy. But for the most part, Trump's approvals bump around at 43% - 44% for the bulk of his tenure until about May 2020, when he starts losing a little steam. Where Trump's approvals really took a hit was in the months following his 2020 defeat, when he devoted the rest of his tenure to a desperate effort to overturn the election results.

x Civiqs Results

Now, a look at President Biden's approvals in Civiqs, which is going to drive Daily Kos readers bonkers because his baseline approval is currently below where Trump's typically sat (though Trump’s current favorable rating is lower). Just remember, Civiqs offers respondents the opportunity to say they either approve/disapprove, or neither (i.e., they're on the fence). Throughout Biden's tenure, the "neither" fence-sitters have been fairly variable, ranging anywhere from 6% -12%; whereas throughout Trump's tenure, only 3% - 4% expressed being unsure about their opinion of Trump.

x Civiqs Results

After getting a post-midterm bump of a couple of points, Biden currently sits at 38% approve/53% disapprove, with 8% saying neither—roughly about where he was in the run-up to the November election. If those fence-sitters were forced to choose, more of them would likely say they approve, putting Biden somewhere in the low- to mid-40s. (The disapprovers are slightly less finicky and much more likely to air their disapproval than toy around with "neither.")

So, in the end, Biden's approval rating in Civiqs is pretty comparable with the findings of the latest NBC News poll (45% approve, 50% disapprove) and Washington Post/ABC News poll (42% approve, 53% disapprove).

Analysts will inevitably want some immediate way to quantify whether Biden's State of the Union was a "win" or a "loss," and looking for several-point shifts in approval is a quick fix for that desire. But attitudes are typically so baked in these days that Biden's approval is highly unlikely to move in any meaningful way over the next several days and weeks.

The more meaningful question will be: How well did Biden lay out the contrast between Democrats and Republicans, and will Democrats successfully drive that message home over the next year and a half?

There's no quick, immediate fix for answering those questions.

As an aside, many once-useful polling measures have grown increasingly useless since Trump took office. Right track/wrong track numbers, for instance, used to provide some very blunt but still useful insights into the mood of the country and how that might figure into an upcoming election. But as we saw in the midterms, the fact that roughly three-quarters of voters believed the country was heading in the wrong direction in August 2022 wasn't particularly predictive of how the party in power fared. Instead, virtually all voters were upset about something, and they held both parties to account at the ballot box.

So the old measures aren't exactly as predictive as they once were. Which measures prove more useful in future elections remains to be seen. But perhaps something along the lines of "Which party is more concerned with people like you?" could render a better measure of how voters view the actions of a party.

Civiqs finds that 42% of registered voters say Democrats are, while 33% say Republicans are, and 23% say neither party is more concerned about their needs.

x Civiqs Results

The question is largely—though not entirely—a measure of how independents gauge the parties. And at this moment, 30% of independent voters say Democrats are more concerned about them, while 25% of indies say Republicans, and 42% say neither party is.

This might be a measure that's worth checking back on throughout the cycle.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2151640/-If-you-hear-pundits-handicapping-a-post-SOTU-approval-bounce-for-Biden-ignore-them

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