Why you should still pay attention to Joe Biden’s approval rating

When it comes to presidential approval ratings, the days of huge fluctuations of opinion and extremely high ratings are over.

Consider that former President Donald Trump’s approval rating fluctuated mainly between 40 and 45%, which earned him the distinction of having the most stable approval rating of any president since World War II. In fact, one of the ways in which Trump incorporated the nickname “Teflon Don” so early was how little his approval number changed in response to the many controversies surrounding him. Former President Barack Obama also saw small fluctuations in his approval numbers.

It’s still early days, but President Biden’s initial approval marks aren’t that impressive either. Or at least this is true when compared to the rankings of previous presidents in the first months of their presidency, often referred to as the “honeymoon” period. (According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 53% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance in office, whereas at this point in the presidency, most new presidents have approval ratings generally close to 60%.)

So, if the new normal is presidential approval ratings that don’t change that much, is it time to abandon them?

Not so fast. On the one hand, we need to recalibrate our expectations regarding presidential approval rates. They just won’t move what a lot in our hyper-polarized political climate. But that does not mean that approval ratings are not a useful window into the public’s overview of a president’s performance. Or that they cannot yet signal a change in political fortunes. And once we pass the presidency, the approval ratings of other American leaders, as governors, see a broader range of support, largely because partisanship is not so ingrained at the state level.

First, the presidency. Nowadays, it is more difficult to have a brilliant approval rating. This is largely thanks to the increase in negative partisanship, which forces most members of the opposite party to disapprove of a new president from the beginning. Consider Gallup’s presidential approval survey conducted a month after the last five onslaught of new presidents. When Gallup interviewed Americans in February 1993, after Bill Clinton became president, they found that 74% of Democrats approved of Clinton’s performance in office, compared with 24% of Republicans. Now, that 50-point party gap in Clinton’s approval rating was by no means negligible, but as the table below shows, it has only grown, with Trump and Biden facing a gap of more than 80 points along the party lines in their first few approval surveys.

In short, the ceiling on a new president’s approval rating has been somewhat embedded since the beginning. Of course, the flip side is that the support of the president’s own party may be less likely to slip, which means that the word for approving a president’s post is also more embedded. For example, while few Democrats have approved Trump, the reason for his approval rating has rarely dropped below 40% because his approval rating among Republicans has remained high. In his first year, he rarely dropped below 80%, and from the end of 2018 until the time he stepped down, he averaged almost 90% approval among Republicans. Therefore, if Trump’s support among Republicans is an indication, Biden’s strong hold on Democratic voters must also last beyond the first days of his presidency. The latest polls, on the other hand, point to Biden at about 90 percent among Democrats.

But the important conclusion here is not that changes in presidential approval cannot yet take place. They can. We just need to adjust our expectations about the size of these fluctuations. Observers may have looked for swings of 10 or more percentage points to assess how the public responded to an especially large event – such as Ronald Reagan’s double-digit decline after the Iran-Contra case became public – but that is simply not a useful barometer more.

See the biggest and fastest slide in Trump’s approval, which came after the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol at the end of his term. That incident generated national outrage, especially due to Trump’s role in inciting violence, but even so, his approval rating dropped just about 5 points nine days later, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. (There were only two other cases where Trump’s approval rating dropped even half either – 2.5 or more points – in a nine-day period. Once in February 2017, after he issued executive orders to start building a wall along the US-Mexico border and suspend the refugee program and ban visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and again in May 2017, after Trump sacked James Comey as FBI director.)

In short: major fluctuations in presidential approval are probably a thing of the past. But small changes in a president’s approval rating can still indicate significant changes in opinion that could herald future election results. For example, the fact that Trump’s approval rating was in his 40s for almost his entire presidency suggested a real electoral vulnerability. And it was a big reason why Democrats shook the House in the 2018 exams and Trump didn’t win re-election in 2020. If Trump had managed to get his 45 percent approval on Election Day 2020, he might as well have won, considering the narrow margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin and the advantage of Republicans in the Electoral College. We shouldn’t read much about Biden’s approval rating at this point, but the fact that he is starting in a stronger position than Trump, with an approval rating in the 50’s, is a good sign for him. If he manages to maintain an approval rating nearby – or increase it marginally by a few points – it could help Democrats limit the president’s party’s typical mid-term losses in 2022 and help Biden win re-election in 2024.

In addition to the national framework, statewide approval research on other civil servants, such as governors, is also very useful. Sometimes, we even see high or low marks for a governor that go against expectations because, in state politics, partisanship does not send voters as automatically to its blue and red corners as it does in national politics.

See Republican Governor Charlie Baker. He gets better ratings from Democrats than from members of his own party in the deep blue of Massachusetts. The MassINC Polling Group found its approval rating at 74% overall in February, but at 86% among Democrats, compared with 62% among Republicans. In contrast, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s mismanagement of his state’s response to COVID-19 not only prevented him from gaining much party support from Republicans, but it also cost him a significant slice of Democratic support. In recent polls, only about 50% of Californians said they approved Newsom, a disheartening display for a Democrat in a state where Biden won 63% of the vote last November. In fact, Newsom’s average numbers are partly the result of only about 7 out of 10 Democrats supporting him.

This is not to say that partisanship still does not play a role. For example, Democrats who currently approve of Baker can very easily end up voting against him in 2022 if he runs again – Massachusetts, after all, is a very blue state. But this is where the approval ratings still have real value: Baker’s approval rating (74 percent) is slightly higher than even his very strong share of votes in his 2018 re-election victory (67 percent of votes), which suggests at least some people have changed their minds about him, and in a positive direction. So if he manages to maintain such a high approval rating, it will give him a real chance to once again get strong support from all parties in 2022 and win a third term, despite belonging to the weakest party in Massachusetts. On the other hand, Newsom is set to face a revocation election this year, and while it is the favorite to survive it, a further drop in its support among Democrats could signal a real vulnerability.

Overall, approval ratings can still tell us a lot about how the public views its leaders, even in our deeply polarized political environment. We just need to recalibrate our expectations as to what is significant when it comes to fluctuations in presidential approval and remember that data on civil servants can still reveal a little about how much one is liked and disliked.