Column: Biden's big speech didn't move the needle. What will it be?

Two weeks after President Biden's State of the Union address, it is clear that the speech has not changed the presidential race.

As before the speech, polls show a very close race: Biden leads by 1 point in a new YouGov poll for The Economist, former President Trump leads by 1 point in an Ipsos poll for Reuters, the two are tied in the latest from Morning Consult, etc. And Trump continues to lead by small amounts in most polls of swing states that will likely decide the election.

Should Democrats panic?

No. Speeches rarely move the world, except in movies. State of the Union addresses, in particular, tend to attract viewers who have already made up their minds. Biden's energetic performance ignited Democratic supporters, but the vast majority of undecided voters missed it.

The biggest concern for Biden may be that his job approval numbers haven't changed, even as rising wages and falling inflation have begun to make Americans less pessimistic about the economy.

As political scientists John Sides of Vanderbilt University and Michael Tesler of UC Irvine wrote this week, “at this point, approval ratings actually predict the final outcome better than polls.” Biden's approval has been stuck for most of the last year at around 40%, well within the danger zone.

What could change that? The answers fall into three broad categories: In the next seven months, voters could start to feel better about the country; a larger proportion of them could begin to sympathize with Biden; or the president could gain votes from people who disapprove of him. None of them are guaranteed, but they are all still plausible.

Improve America's Vision

I've written before about the huge disconnect between voters' negative views on the economy and the positive picture painted by economic statistics. With unemployment near its lowest level in 50 years, inflation falling and wages rising, pessimism has begun to ease, but remains at a level that baffles many economists.

The most likely explanation is that, although prices have stopped their rapid rise, everyday goods and services (gas, groceries, and rent) are still much more expensive than they were a couple of years ago. Average wages have risen faster than prices over the past year, but many families are still struggling.

The hope of Democratic strategists is that voters' negative feelings about the economy are mostly due to a time lag, and that memories of the rapid inflation of 2022 and early 2023 will soon fade. And indeed, measures of consumer confidence have improved compared to last year's findings, but that has yet to lead to warmer evaluations of Biden from voters.

A similar argument applies to crime: Last year saw what appears to be “by far the largest single-year decline in murders ever recorded,” crime data analyst Jeff Asher wrote after the FBI released this week preliminary crime figures for 2023. (Comparable crime data in the United States dates back to 1960.) Some cities, including Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee, bucked the trend, but in most of the country, The homicide rate has come close to erasing the peak that occurred during the COVID-19 years.

Overall levels of violent crime have improved further: they are now down to levels last seen in the mid-1960s.

However, much of the public still thinks that the United States is in the midst of a crime wave.

Some of that has to do with partisanship and some with media coverage of rare but spectacular crimes: New York subway shootings, for example. But as with economics, part of the gap between perception and reality involves time lags. Continuous improvement could lead to more positive opinions.

Typically, as Sides and Tesler wrote, a president's approval numbers rise by at least a few points during an election year. This was true for Presidents Nixon, Clinton, and Obama, and it should come as no surprise: Sitting presidents are typically able to raise enormous amounts of money to publicize their accomplishments.

Improving opinions of Biden

Biden definitely fits that pattern in fundraising. Between his main campaign account and the Democratic National Committee, Biden's team entered March with $98 million in the bank, according to financial disclosure reports, compared to $38 million on Trump's side. Additional Biden-affiliated committees bring $155 million in cash on hand, the campaign says, and have launched a major spring advertising effort in swing states.

A key audience is Democrats who plan to vote for a third-party candidate or stay home. Polls indicate that Biden wins support from about 80% to 85% of Democratic voters, while Trump wins support from more than 90% of Republicans. Evening that disparity would put Biden in better shape.

Win over those who disapprove

Even if there are some improvements, Biden will most likely have historically low approval ratings when he faces voters in November.

White House and campaign officials profess a lack of concern: Although “favorability and vote choice have historically been correlated,” Biden adviser Jennifer O'Malley Dillon said in a recent interview with the New Yorker, “Actually I think that is no longer the case. .”

Democratic advisers cite results from the 2022 midterm elections. According to exit polls, Democratic candidates won a slim majority of voters who said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden.

The reason is simple: Those voters also disapprove of Trump.

That's why the campaign will likely focus primarily on “double disapprovers”: Americans who don't like either Biden or Trump.

About 1 in 4 American adults falls into that category, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from a survey of 12,693 adults conducted Feb. 13-25. (The share is slightly lower among adults who vote: closer to 1 in 5, according to national data from Marquette University in Wisconsin.)

Those double disapprovers are disproportionately young: 41% of Americans ages 18 to 29 view Trump and Biden negatively, compared to 15% of those 65 and older, Pew found. These disapprovers are also more common among Latinos and Asian Americans than among their white or black counterparts.

Another important group among those who disapprove: the people who voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary. Just over half of voters who supported her disapproved of both Trump and Biden, Pew found.

But dislike of Trump is not as intense or widespread as it was in 2020.

A Suffolk University poll conducted in early March for USA Today found, for example, that approval of Trump's performance in office is now higher than during his time in office. That's an example of how nostalgia tends to boost presidential ratings after the fact, but also how Trump is currently benefiting from the retrospective glow of the relatively good economic times of his first three years in office.

To counter that blow, Democrats are implementing a two-pronged approach that is already visible in the Biden campaign. One aspect involves reminding voters of the chaos of the Trump years, which culminated with his supporters attacking the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Congress from finalizing election results that would show that had lost. Republicans respond with attacks on Biden's age.

The other end is more ideological: On both sides of the aisle, those who disapprove twice as often identify as moderates, polls show.

In 2016, a key reason Trump won was that voters, on average, considered him closer to the political center than his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Once in office, of course, Trump veered to the right, losing that moderate advantage. This time, he has tried to regain control on at least some issues: refusing to say publicly what kind of abortion ban he might support, for example, and attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his past support of cuts to Medicare. and Social Security. .

A major effort by the Biden campaign aims to convince voters that a re-elected Trump would once again try to govern from the right, not just on immigration, where Trump has openly called for mass deportations, but on issues such as health care, abortion rights and social policy. Security.

With Biden and Trump so familiar, the number of undecided voters in 2024 may be lower than ever, but the classic formulation of American politics remains valid: winning requires capturing the center.