Did we just get proof that Joe Biden’s approval rating numbers are way off?
There’s something I’ve idly suspected for awhile, but I haven’t previously voiced it because there wasn’t the evidence to make such an assertion – until now. Everyone now acknowledges that the polls are becoming broken in general. Tuesday’s midterm results proved as much. But if election polling is consistently inaccurate these days, should we really keep presuming that presidential approval rating polling these days is any less inaccurate?
There are two layers here. One is that the mainstream media has spent the past year cherry picking the polls that show President Joe Biden’s approval rating in the thirties and hyping them for their “shocking” nature, while fully ignoring the polls that show Biden’s approval rating in the forties. The entire mainstream media (on the left and right) has been so consistently dishonest about it, even most of Biden’s supporters don’t know that Biden’s average approval rating has never dropped below 41% at any point in his presidency. You can look it up right here, with a chart and everything. But all anyone ever hears is the media hyping Biden’s very worst, and thus most ratings-friendly, numbers.
Here’s the thing. The dishonest antics I’ve described above has been standard operating procedure for as least as long as I’ve been studying politics. But now we’re dealing with a different issue: the polls themselves, for whatever combination of reasons, having turned to crap over the past few years.
New Presidents, even popular ones, nearly always lose their first midterms in a blowout. So if Joe Biden really does have a mere 41% approval rating, then the Democrats should have lost fifty House seats and five Senate seats on Tuesday. But that didn’t happen at all. Instead, Biden’s Democratic Party is coming close to breaking even in the House and Senate – a monumental achievement that flies sharply in the face of history.
Yes, a number of factors went into it, including Roe. But it all still points to Biden in fact being broadly popular, not someone who only has the support of two out of every five Americans. That’s absurd on its face.
Of course you can’t accuse statistical data of being wrong just because it “sounds” wrong. And frankly, if polling these days were accurate in general, there wouldn’t be a basis for saying what I’m about to say. But given that polling these days is wildly inaccurate in general, it’s not in any way controversial to suggest that presidential approval rating polling might be just inaccurate. And when you consider that Biden’s party just significantly outperformed its own polling data in the midterms, it’s not a stretch to suggest that Biden is in fact significantly more popular than approval rating polling claims.
So what is Biden’s actual approval rating? That unfortunately comes down to guesswork. There’s no formula that lets you work backward and convert the midterm results into approval rating. But if you didn’t know anything about Biden’s approval rating polling to begin with, you you had to take a guess based solely on the midterm results, would a 50% Biden approval rating sound reasonable? At the least, you can make a better argument that it’s at 50% than you can that it’s at 41%, where the polling averages have it. And it’s certainly not down in the thirties, like Biden’s worst individual approval rating polling numbers claim.
In any case, based on what we all saw on Tuesday, one thing I suspect I can say without much controversy is that Joe Biden will likely run for reelection in 2024 and he will likely win. Biden keeps hinting that he wants to run again. After these midterm results, why wouldn’t he run? Presidential elections have a uniquely large incumbency advantage to begin with. Biden just defied every historical trend and split his first midterms. And the Republicans are stuck with a guy who’s insisting on announcing a 2024 presidential campaign just before he’s indicted for espionage. Joe is going to run again, isn’t he?
