Biden’s Approval Remains Unusually Steady

Jonathan Bernstein: “Joe Biden’s approval rating fell to its lowest point during his presidency last month, and he exits the July 4 holiday weekend at just 51.9% approval, close to that June low (as usual, I’m using the excellent FiveThirtyEight estimate, based on an adjusted average of all the reputable polls). At the same time, it’s just as likely that Biden’s popularity is holding steady rather than actually slipping. He remains in a narrow range, between a high of 55.1% approval and a low of 51.7%. It’s possible he’s fallen a bit; it’s also possible that his approval rating has been unchanged from Jan. 20 and that any apparent fluctuations are just statistical noise.”

“Either way, Biden’s numbers place him right about in the middle of recent presidents. At the 166-day point in their presidencies, he’s beating four presidents from the polling era: Donald Trump, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and, by a very narrow margin, George W. Bush. The other nine polling-era presidents are all beating him. What distinguishes Biden continues to be how flat his approval line is. Every previous president except Trump had either started his presidency above 60% approval or had spiked up to that level at some point by now. And they all had a larger range observed in the polls at this point; Ronald Reagan, for example, had already experienced a 17-percentage-point surge and then a 10-point drop.”