If it is possible to summarize a presidency in a single number, that number would be the president’s approval rating – or the share of Americans who approve of the work he is doing. Arguably, this simple percentage can determine the fate of an entire presidency.
For example, a high approval rating can garner support for a president’s agenda and minimize his party’s losses in mid-term elections – not to mention helping the president himself win re-election. But a low approval rating can be an electoral poison and imply that a president has lost the mandate to rule entirely.
In a nutshell, that’s why we at FiveThirtyEight track the president’s approval rating (and his cousin with a half-empty glass, disapproval rating) in real time – first for former President Donald Trump and now for President Biden . According to our average of all the Biden approval polls we’ve had so far, Biden starts his government with an approval rating of 53.9% and a disapproval rate of 35.1%. (If you only look at probable or registered voter polls – which you can do using the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the interactive – the numbers are similar: 54.4 percent approval, 36.0 percent disapproval. The same is true for surveys specifically for all adults: 53.2 percent approval, 31.6 percent disapproval.)
These are strong approval numbers compared to what we’ve gotten used to seeing over the past four years. But they probably won’t be too tall either, as presidents often experience a “honeymoon” period of inflated popularity during their first months in office. As my colleague Geoffrey Skelley wrote on Tuesday, some experts believe that political polarization has made the presidential honeymoon a thing of the past, but for now at least, Biden seems to be enjoying one: he has a net approval rating + 18.9 points (pass rate minus disapproval rate) after winning the election by just 4.5 points.
That said, it is a less impressive honeymoon than many former presidents, suggesting that partisanship is taking its toll. For reference, at this point in his presidencies, Bill Clinton had a net approval rating of + 36.3 points, George W. Bush had a net approval rating of + 32.0 points and Barack Obama had a net approval rating of + + 39.3 points. Trump is the only president who started his administration with a net approval rating lower than that of Biden: +2.0 points on January 27, 2017.
While Biden’s approval rating is somewhat on par with Clinton, Bush and Obama, his disapproval rating is much, much higher, reflecting the built-in animosity that many Americans already have for him. (You can compare Biden’s pass rate, disapproval rate, and net approval rate to that of previous presidents, from Harry Truman, to the bottom of our interactive.)
How do we condense dozens of approval rating searches into a single number? It is not a simple average! We use an empirically tested weighted average that takes into account the quality and uncertainty of the research. It is the same methodology we use to calculate Trump’s average pass rating and similar to the approach we use in our electoral forecasts and other survey averages; here’s a more detailed explanation.
First, our indefatigable team of research researchers collects each national survey of the president’s approval rating; we do not disregard any scientific research conducted in a legitimate way (this is because we do not want to be in a position to make subjective judgments about how “good” a research needs to be in order for it to be included), although we do assign different weights (more on this in just a moment). You can see these individual surveys listed just below the main chart on the approval rating page and download them via the link at the bottom of the page.
(A quick maintenance note here: researchers sometimes release numbers for the president’s approval rating across different populations – for example, all adults vs. registered voters vs. likely voters. In this case, the pattern is the result that represents the broader range of people – adults over registered voters, registered voters over likely voters. However, as mentioned earlier, we also have versions of the average that calculates the president’s approval rating only among adult polls or just voters.)
Next, we determine how much weight to give to each survey in our average. First, surveys conducted by researchers with higher ratings of FiveThirtyEight – a note of letters that measures how accurate and methodologically reliable the researchers are – are given more weight. Second, surveys with larger sample sizes also count for more. Finally, we reduced the weight of searches done by researchers who research the approval rating very often (that is, more than once every 20 days), so that no researcher is exerting much influence on the average. Each researcher’s assessment, sample size and final weight in our average are displayed next to it in our list.
From these weighted averages, we calculate a trend line of the president’s approval and disapproval ratings over time using local polynomial regression – basically, by drawing a smooth curve over the individual data points. (But not too smooth – you don’t want the average to respond to the movement in polls. We choose our smoothness settings based on what historically best predicted a president’s future approval and poll disapproval ratings since 1945, which results visually not to look too good.)
But wait! The first trend line we calculate is not the one you see on the page. Instead, we use the initial trendline to see if a given researcher’s searches are consistently better or worse for Biden than the weighted average – in other words, if the searcher has a “home effect”. Research surveys that systematically overestimate or underestimate Biden are then adjusted to remove this domestic effect. For example, Republican opinion pollster Rasmussen Reports has an anti-Biden effect (and had a pro-Trump) that must be taken into account when judging his polls. Consequently, our model adjusted its recent research which gave Biden an approval rating of 48% and a disapproval rate of 48% to 50% approval and 43% disapproval. The adjusted approval and disapproval ratings for each survey are displayed in the rightmost column of the approval tracker’s survey list, right after the raw and unadjusted numbers for the survey.
From there, we just rinse and repeat: The adjusted voting numbers are used to calculate a new trend line, which is used to calculate new adjusted voting numbers, which are used to calculate other new trend line – and so on. The end result, once the cycle is completed, is the main pass and fail classification chart that you see in our interactive. And you can use this chart to check not only Biden’s average pass and fail ratings as they are today, but also as they were at the end of any day during his administration. (Note that these daily assessments are based on surveys released until that date, not necessarily surveys conducted Until this date; we don’t go back and recalculate the average from the previous days as soon as more data is available.)
You can also download Biden’s average approval ratings for all days of your term, as well as all the surveys that go into the calculation, by clicking on the appropriate links at the bottom of the page. This document also includes upper and lower limit estimates for Biden’s approval and disapproval ratings, which are represented interactively by the areas shaded in green and orange around the main trend lines. This represents the fact that there is uncertainty in our average approval rating: both surveys and our average have a margin of error.
We calculated this uncertainty by measuring how well our approval rating estimates for previous presidents (since Truman) predicted future searches for their approval rating. The things that make confidence intervals wider (that is, things that make us less secure) include the scarcity of polls, a high level of disagreement in the polls we have, and a lot of volatility in a president’s approval rating in the long run. Things that make confidence intervals narrower include a lot of research, highly consistent research and a very stable long-term average.
We set the width of our confidence intervals so that 90% of future searches are within that range. And we also offer a provisional forecast for the direction in which the averages will tend; toggle the key that says “Today” to “4 years” in the bottom right corner of the graph to see it.
Since approval ratings have historically tended to return to average and also slightly deteriorate over the term of a president, we expect Biden’s approval rating to decrease and his disapproval rating to increase (as represented by the dotted lines in the graph). But, as you can see, the 90 percent confidence interval for approval and disapproval gets much broader the further you go in the future, which means that a wide range of results is possible for Biden’s long-term popularity. Even in this era of intense polarization, circumstances and actions can still affect the president’s approval rating, so Biden’s political future is, at least in part, in his own hands.
So this seems like a good reason, if we say so, to tag our Biden approval tracker and check it frequently. And if you have any questions about our methodology, comments on the interactive or missing surveys that we need to add, don’t hesitate to send us a message to [email protected].