State of the Union Brings No Approval Bump for Biden

President Joe Biden received a spate of positive headlines after his second State of the Union address, but the high-profile moment didn’t leave much of an impression on voters, according to new Morning Consult survey data.

Sentiment on Biden unchanged post-State of the Union

• After remarks focused on touting his achievements and urging lawmakers to help “finish the job” with his agenda, 39% of registered voters said Biden “has been keeping his promises” while in office, unchanged from a survey conducted before his Feb. 7 speech. Just under half of voters (46%) said he has not kept his promises.
• The latest survey, conducted Feb. 10-12, found 44% of voters approve of Biden’s job performance, which is also unchanged from the preceding Feb. 4-5 survey. Most voters (54%) disapprove of his work in office.
• On the issues, roughly half of voters (49%) approve of his handling of protecting Medicare and Social Security, a key focus of his speech amid the debt limit fight, while more voters than not disapprove of how he’s dealing with national security (47%) and foreign policy (48%) amid the fallout from the Chinese surveillance balloon incursion. All of those figures are in line with the previous week’s survey findings.

How Biden’s case broke through to voters

The lack of a bump after the speech this year stands in contrast to the modest improvement Biden saw after last year’s address to Congress, which drew a larger audience than the 27.3 million people estimated by Nielsen to have tuned in on television last week.

Still, roughly 2 in 5 voters (38%) said they had seen, read or heard “a lot” about this year’s speech — higher than the 29% who said the same in March — and the kind of information the electorate took away about the president saw a slight improvement. In the latest survey, 34% said they had recently heard something positive about Biden, up from 29% the previous week, though voters are still more likely to report hearing something negative than positive about the president.

Despite that, Biden’s popularity has been generally stable since a summertime improvement ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, during which Democrats overperformed expectations despite the electorate’s disapproving views about the commander in chief. 

That raises questions about how much voters’ impressions about Biden himself will matter for the Democratic Party in 2024. Democrats were able to leverage negative sentiment about Donald Trump and the Republican Party to great effect in November, coming close to maintaining their House majority and prying a Senate seat from the GOP’s grip. 

A Morning Consult/Politico survey conducted after the latest State of the Union underlines the case: Comparing Biden’s speech with Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ response on behalf of the Republicans, voters were more likely to associate the president’s presentation with positive terms.

What voters thought about Biden’s speech and the GOP response

• Voters who watched the State of the Union address and the Republican response were more likely to cast Biden’s speech as positive, nonpartisan and unifying.
• Those who tuned in for both speeches were more likely to describe Sanders’ talk as negative, partisan and extreme.
• Still, respondents who watched both politicians were equally likely to say Biden and Sanders’ addresses were excellent or good (54% to 53%), and they also clocked similar poor ratings (29% to 28%).

The latest surveys were conducted Feb. 10-12, 2023, among representative samples of roughly 2,000 registered voters, with unweighted margins of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.