Great news for President-elect Joe Biden
New U.S. Presidents always get something of a grace period. Even after contentious or controversial elections, they tend to enter office with an approval rating well above 50%, as folks in the middle decide to give them a chance. This gives a new President a lot of clout and muscle coming in the door. That approval rating usually drops over time, like a shiny coat of paint wearing thin, and eventually stabilizes somewhere.
In hindsight, Donald Trump’s presidency was doomed the minute he took office with an approval rating in the low forties, with no viable plan for how to improve it. Sure enough, four years later, he lost in a seven million vote blowout, just as his consistently low approval made clear that he would.
So it’s notable that in the month since Joe Biden won the election, his approval rating has begun to climb. Gallup, for example, now has Biden pegged at 55%. So much for the notion that Trump’s refusal to concede, or his supporters’ resulting denial, was going to somehow harm Biden’s perceived legitimacy. His numbers should continue rising as we get closer to inauguration, meaning Biden will take office with significant clout in the minds of the American people.
Meanwhile, Gallup now has Trump’s approval rating at 41%. That’s even lower than it was just before the election. In other words, some folks in the middle were still giving him the benefit of the doubt (or merely a public stamp of approval for patriotic reasons) the entire time – yet now that Trump has lost, they’re increasingly done with him.
