Biden’s Approval Rating Is Remarkably Flat

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Trying to find something interesting in President Joe Biden’s approval ratings is starting to get harder and harder. His numbers continue to be uncannily stable.

Biden has been in office 80 days as of Friday. Using the FiveThirtyEight polling estimator, he began his term at 53.0%; he’s gone from a low of 52.7% to a high of 55.1%, and he’s currently at 53.3%. That’s a whopping range of fewer than 2.5 percentage points — and that may well overestimate changes that have happened. It’s plausible that he’s been sitting at exactly the same spot from Jan. 20 through April 8, with any apparent movement merely statistical illusion. (To be fair, it’s also possible that he’s really fluctuated as much as 5 percentage points or so, and some of the eerie stability is the statistical illusion.)

How unusual is this? By this point, Donald Trump’s range (that is, his top average to his bottom average) was 7.4 percentage points, or three times Biden’s movement. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were both just shy of 9 percentage points. George W. Bush? More than 12 percentage points.

This does mean that Biden’s honeymoon has been, at best, unimpressive; other than the perpetually unpopular Trump, Biden has the lowest peak (at 55.1%, compared with George W. Bush’s 58.6%). He’s spent most of the past month beating only Trump and Gerald Ford. To be sure: It’s far too early to guess how popular Biden will be going into the midterms in 2022, let alone a re-election campaign. Trump, Ford, Obama, Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman had already reached the best approval ratings they would ever get at this point, and Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy would also peak very early, but that still leaves six presidents from the polling era who peaked after the traditional honeymoon period. And that includes George H.W. Bush, who peaked after the midterms and still lost re-election.

Biden’s disapproval rating continues to beat only Trump’s. But by staying put, he’s gaining on the field. Biden’s disapproval began at 34.0%, and he’s slipped now to 39.9%, just a few ticks better than his worst number. But by now, Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton, all of whom began with disapproval ratings below 20%, were right around 30%. Approval ratings are all over the place historically, but disapproval tells a very simple story: The farther back in time we go, the more people outside the president’s party offered no rating at all at the start of a term, while these days no one hesitates to tell pollsters they disapprove of a brand new president from the other party.

Bottom line? Biden so far is doing fine, but no better than that. It’s certainly possible that he’s just going to be stable for his entire presidency, that partisan polarization is so strong that nothing else — the president’s actions, the economy, scandal — matters. Or perhaps Biden’s popularity is really just an echo of everyone’s settled opinions about Trump, even through he’s out of office. On the other hand, George W. Bush’s rollercoaster of a presidency wasn’t all that long ago, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Biden’s early stability gives way to, well, almost anything.

1. Seth Masket and Hans Noel debunk five myths about U.S. political parties.

2. Mika Hackner at the Monkey Cage on Germany and Turkey.

3. Ezra Klein on the Biden presidency.

4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Clara Ferreira Marques on Canada and climate.

5. And Geoffrey Skelley on Iowa, New Hampshire and the 2024 presidential nominations.

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