After four-plus months of Joe Biden’s presidency, we can finally say something about his polling numbers with a fair degree of confidence: His initially high disapproval numbers, second only to Donald Trump during the polling era, were likely an artifact of partisanship and had little to do with Biden himself.
We can say that because Biden’s huge lead in disapproval (over, again, everyone but Trump) is disappearing. At the 134-day mark, Biden is no longer second-worst. He’s now passed Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, both of whom he has also passed in approval ratings.
What’s more, Biden has gained ground on almost all of his 12 predecessors. He began his presidency with a whopping 36% disapproval rating, and now has reached 40.1%. Rounding off, Trump gained 12 percentage points of disapproval through 134 days. Barack Obama gained 20 percentage points. George W. Bush gained 19, Clinton 32, George H.W. Bush seven, Ronald Reagan eight, Jimmy Carter 11, Ford 40, Richard Nixon nine, Lyndon Johnson 10 and John Kennedy five. If we go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower, we finally get someone who had the same 4.1 percentage-point gain in disapproval. Harry Truman didn’t add any disapproval, but that may have been because there weren’t enough polls to accurately estimate.
To be sure: Biden, like all recent presidents, has relatively high disapproval numbers at this point. From Truman through George H.W. Bush, only Ford, suffering the effects of his pardon of Nixon, had higher than a 21% disapproval number. The five most recent presidents had all reached at least 33% disapproval. What’s changed is partisan polarization; nowadays, the vast majority of Democrats are immediately ready to think badly of any Republican president, and vice versa for Republicans.
Biden’s numbers suggest that the trend is still accelerating. As recently as Obama’s presidency, opposite-party voters were willing to at least pretend to give the new president a chance for a few weeks. Now, they don’t even do that.
Of course, as demonstrated by Clinton, Reagan and, most dramatically, George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, voters can change their minds and start liking a president they once disapproved of. At least, that used to be the case; the jury is out on whether that’s still true now, with Biden’s early presidency producing unusually stable approval and disapproval numbers.
What’s less clear is whether this trend makes any difference. Certainly, there’s no pressure on Republican legislators to cooperate in any way with the Biden administration. But whether that’s the cause of Republican rejectionism or the consequence of it is a harder question. Either way, early opposition from out-party voters doesn’t seem to have harmed Biden much so far.
Bloomberg
