President Joe Biden’s approval rating average reaches its highest point in a year and a half
President Joe Biden’s average approval rating on the FiveThirtyEight model is now at its highest point in a year and a half. No surprise. The 2022 midterm results proved that Biden was far more popular than approval rating polls had been showing. So pollsters have likely been revising their methodologies to try to catch up.
In reality, Biden’s approval rating numbers stopped making sense a long time ago. According to the polling averages, ten percent of the country – twenty percent of Biden’s own supporters – instantly turned fully against him over the Afghanistan withdrawal. This never made much sense, as most of the people condemning Biden the most loudly for the withdrawal had been anti-Biden to begin with.
At the time my suspicion was that because the entire mainstream media (particularly CNN) used Afghanistan as an opportunity to start cartoonishly bashing Biden in an effort to gin up ratings, the pollsters somehow got baited into massively oversampling that small segment of Americans who went from pro-Biden to anti-Biden over Afghanistan. This resulted in Biden’s approval rating numbers being well below his actual popularity, from the summer of 2021 onward. But while pollsters may have since come to suspect they overshot the mark, they never had any hard data to confirm it – until the 2022 midterm elections.
Even with the other major factors baked in – Roe, Trump’s unpopularity weighing down the Republicans’ prospects – the 2022 midterm results still suggested that Biden’s approval rating was likely around 50%. At the time, the approval rating averages had him at around 41%. I predicted that pollsters would take the hard data from the midterm results and use it to start gradually recalibrating their polling methodologies in an effort to revise Biden’s approval rating into more accurate territory. Sure enough, since then Biden has gone from 41% to now 44% in the polling averages.
The simplistic explanation you’ll hear for this is that he wasn’t very popular, then Republicans took over the House and began embarrassing themselves, and so more of the public started circling back to supporting Biden. But this doesn’t account for the fact that the midterms proved back in December that Biden was already popular before the Republicans even started stinking it up in the House.
If Biden’s approval rating was really around 50% as of last November, and House Republican antics have given Biden a few more points since then, he should be in the low to mid fifties by now.
If pollsters have indeed been gradually tweaking their methodologies since November to try to account for the reality that Biden was at around 50% back when they thought he was at 41%, then they’ll likely continue tweaking their methodologies. After all, they appear to only be about one-third of the way there. And if Republican House antics are actually making Biden more popular, we’ll see that showing up in approval rating numbers as well.
In other words, it’s great news for Joe Biden that his approval rating average is up to 44% and at its highest point in a year and a half. That’s a number and a trajectory that as of now puts Biden solidly on track for reelection. But given that we know his approval rating numbers were never nearly as low to begin with as we’d been told, he’s certainly much higher than 44% by now. So he’s even more firmly on track for reelection than these still-likely-lowballed approval rating numbers are suggesting.
No presidential election is won or lost by itself. Even if Biden remains firmly on track for reelection in 2024, it’ll still be close in the swing states (it always is), and Biden will need significant effort from his supporters in order to ensure victory (it always works that way).
But the fact remains that the 2022 midterm elections made clear that President Biden was far more popular than approval rating polls had spent the previous year-plus claiming, and now those approval rating polls are starting to come around to reality. These things are never a straight line, but Biden’s numbers should likely keep climbing for awhile.
