Democrats would like to believe that President Biden changed the 2024 game with his State of the Union address Thursday night, demonstrating verve and combativeness amid concerns about his age and mental acuity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not so clear the American public saw the home run that they did.<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s campaign and some media outlets have pointed to a post-speech instant CNN poll showing 65 percent of viewers offered a positive review of Biden\u2019s speech. Viewers also shifted 17 points toward believing the country is headed in the right direction \u2014 from 45 percent before the speech to 62 percent afterward.<\/p>\n
Both of these are true. What\u2019s also true is that State of the Union speeches almost always receive strongly favorable views, in part because viewership tends to draw disproportionately from their allies.<\/p>\n
The 65 percent who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century \u2014 the previous low being Donald Trump\u2019s 2018 address (70 percent).<\/p>\n
And the 35 percent who offered a \u201cvery\u201d positive review was effectively tied with Biden\u2019s speech last year (34 percent) for the lowest on record. The next lowest were Biden\u2019s 2022 speech and George W. Bush\u2019s 2007 speech, which each earned \u201cvery\u201d positive marks from 41 percent of viewers.<\/p>\n
The 17-point shift toward the country moving in the \u201cright direction\u201d was also unremarkable, historically speaking. Dating back to Bill Clinton\u2019s 1998 State of the Union address, viewers have shifted an average of 15 points toward that more optimistic view.<\/p>\n
Now we get to the caveat, and that\u2019s that viewers Thursday were less aligned with the president than your average State of the Union audience \u2014 potentially because we\u2019re in a campaign year, or because questions about Biden\u2019s ability to perform drew in more people who were skeptical of him.<\/p>\n
That appears to explain at least part of the poorer-than-normal reviews \u2014 but not all.<\/p>\n
The CNN sample was 36 percent Democratic and 30 percent Republican. Generally speaking, members of a president\u2019s party will outnumber members of the opposite party by double digits.<\/p>\n
But we have seen such closely divided audiences and with stronger reviews. In Trump\u2019s 2017 and 2018 speeches, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by just five percentage points in CNN\u2019s sample. Trump\u2019s reviews in those speeches were still stronger than Biden\u2019s on Thursday: 78 percent positive (including 57 percent \u201cvery\u201d positive) in 2017, and 70 percent positive reviews (including 48 percent \u201cvery\u201d positive) in 2018.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s early, and it\u2019s worth keeping an eye out for other data \u2014 not just direct reviews of the speech, but evidence of any actual shifts in the electorate that come in the days and weeks afterward. The basic reviews of the speech might not account for how people\u2019s notions might have fundamentally changed on issues such as Biden\u2019s acuity. Those will be the numbers we should really watch.<\/p>\n
While this is the most robust data we have, it\u2019s not the only data. YouGov came out with a post-speech poll Friday afternoon. But it wasn\u2019t resounding either; it showed 30 percent thought the speech would make people like Biden more, while 23 percent thought it would make them like him less.<\/p>\n
Independents were about evenly split on the question. But Democrats wagered by a 56-8 margin that it would help Biden\u2019s popularity.<\/p>\n
Hope springs eternal.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Democrats would like to believe that President Biden changed the 2024 game with his State of the Union address Thursday night, demonstrating verve and combativeness amid concerns about his age and mental acuity. It\u2019s not so clear the American public saw the home run that they did. Biden\u2019s campaign and some media outlets have pointed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1918,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}