Biden’s State of the Union poll results

The Biden campaign and some media outlets pointed out that in a CNN instant poll after the speech, 65% of viewers evaluated Biden’s speech positively. Viewers also shifted 17 points toward believing the country was heading in the right direction, from 45% before the speech to 62% after the speech.

Both of these are true. It is also true that State of the Union addresses almost always garner very positive reviews. One reason for this is that ratings tend to disproportionately come from allies.

The 65% who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any other speech CNN has surveyed in the past quarter century — the previous lowest was President Donald Trump’s 2018 speech (70%). )was.

And the 35% who gave it a “very” positive rating was virtually the same as last year’s speech by Biden (34%), the lowest on record. The next lowest ratings were Biden’s 2022 speech and George W. Bush’s 2007 speech, each receiving a “very” rating from 41% of viewers.

Historically, the 17-point change in moving the country in the “right direction” was not remarkable. Going back to Bill Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union address, viewers shifted an average of 15 points toward that more optimistic view.

Now, here’s the thing: Thursday’s audience was less sympathetic to the president than the average State of the Union viewer. This is likely because it is during an election period, or because doubts about Biden’s ability to perform have attracted more people. They were skeptical of him.

This seems to explain at least some of the worse than usual reviews, but not all.

In CNN’s sample, 36 percent were Democrats and 30 percent were Republicans. Generally, the number of members of a president’s party exceeds his number of members of the opposing party by two orders of magnitude.

But we’ve seen this much more divided audiences and stronger reviews. In Trump’s 2017 and 2018 speeches, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by just 5 percentage points in CNN’s sample. Mr. Trump’s ratings in those speeches remained stronger than Mr. Biden’s on Thursday. In 2017, 78% were positive (of which 57% were “very” positive), and in 2018, 70% were positive (of which 48% were “very” positive).

That’s premature, and it’s worth keeping an eye on not just a direct review of the speech, but also other data that is evidence of real shifts in the electorate in the days and weeks that follow. A basic review of the speech may not account for how fundamentally people’s conceptions have changed regarding issues such as Biden’s acumen. These are the numbers we should really pay attention to.

This is the most robust data we have, but it is not the only data. YouGov released a poll after the speech on Friday afternoon. But that didn’t resonate either. They found that 30% of respondents thought the speech would increase their favorability toward Biden, while 23% thought it would decrease their favorability toward Biden.

The opinion of independents was almost evenly split on this question. But Democrats bet by a 56-8 margin that it would help Biden’s popularity.