Joe Biden is (relatively) popular. In a hyper-polarized election, how is that possible?

Americans are as dug into their partisan corners, distrustful of their leaders and pessimistic about the direction of the country as ever before.

And yet, entering the final weeks of a brutal election, Joe Biden is only getting more popular.

More voters than not now view the Democratic presidential nominee favorably, according to a battery of recent polls, after a swift rise since the summer in the 2020 race that occurred even amid an onslaught of criticism from President Donald Trump, who is still viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.

The development has surprised operatives in both parties and marks a stark turnaround from the 2016 presidential election, during which a hyper-polarized electorate was deeply skeptical of both major party candidates.

Biden’s rise in popularity has also elicited no shortage of argument over whether it’s a product of the former vice president’s unusually positive campaign or an incumbent president unwilling to relinquish the spotlight throughout a tumultuous campaign.

“The president’s best scenario for re-election was making the election a choice between the incumbent and an unacceptable alternative,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “But both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done a good job making the election a referendum on Donald Trump rather than a choice.”

Whether a candidate’s favorability rating is a major factor in winning a presidential election is itself the subject of a debate among political professionals. Throughout the race, the Trump campaign has openly dismissed the idea that voters care about which candidate they’d rather get a beer with as the coronavirus pandemic and economic recession rages on.

But Democrats argue that personal popularity at least partially explains Biden’s edge over Trump in national and battleground state polls, adding that it’s one of the biggest differences between the 2020 and 2016 races.

“I do think [the Biden campaign] does have a real understanding of where people are in this moment of collective grief and rage, and have the good sense to understand that one of the best closing arguments that they can make is this is a guy who understands that grief in particular, that trauma in particular,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist.

Biden’s popularity in recent polls has ranged from robust (a Fox News poll found 58% of voters viewed him favorably compared to 41% who didn’t) to modest (a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found 43% viewed him favorably compared to 42% who didn’t).

A New York Times/Siena College survey released Tuesday split the difference, with 53% of voters seeing him favorably and 43% viewing him unfavorably.

But according to a polling average compiled by RealClearPolitics, the share of voters overall who see him favorably has improved significantly since late spring, when a plurality of them saw Biden unfavorably.

Now, 51% of voters see him favorably, according to the average, while 44% see him unfavorably.

Impressions of Biden are much more positive than those of the president — whose favorability was deeply underwater in 2016 and has only marginally improved this year — and even the last Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. An early November 2016 NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that only 38% of respondents held a positive view of Clinton, while 53% had a negative view, a net 15-point difference.

To some Democrats, explanations for the discrepancy in favorability between their last two nominees starts with their personal differences.

“Hillary sometimes does have a bit of an edge rhetorically, and she will take on a fight,” said Democratic Rep. David Price of North Carolina. “And Joe will too, but Joe just has a gift for taking off the rough edges and kind of drawing a circle that includes rather than excludes others.”

Price added that he thought Clinton’s divisive image was a concoction of decades of conservative criticism. But if she is defined in part by those negative attacks (and gaffe-prone moments like referring to some of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”), the Biden campaign and its well-funded allies have made a concerted effort to be defined by their own positive ads.

Data compiled by the Wesleyan Media Project found that over a nearly month-long stretch from mid-September to mid-October, only a small share of ads from the presidential campaigns and their allied outside groups were purely negative attacks against Trump, with much higher percentages of positive ads and ads that mixed praise of Biden and criticism of the president.

“We are not ignoring the candidate we’re running against, of course,” Patrick Bonsignore, the Biden campaign’s director of paid media, said during an interview in July. “But we just want to make sure we’re forging a clear and at times explicit contrast between the lack of leadership in the White House right now and somebody who has been there before and has a core empathy.”

That commitment to praising Biden — including ads that have highlighted the loss of his son Beau and his prominent role in Barack Obama’s White House — may have helped increase his popularity recently. Data from Priorities USA, a pro-Biden super PAC, found that the former vice president’s favorability numbers were underwater, 42% to 45%, in September among voters in the top battleground states. At the time, 11% described themselves as neutral.

By October, however, Biden’s favorability had risen to 51% with 43% seeing him unfavorably, and only 6% calling themselves neutral. An official with the group attributed most the shift to former neutral voters moving into the positive category.

But if Biden’s plan at least partially worked, some GOP operatives said that Trump’s ineffective effort thus far to define his opponent is also part of the reason he is more popular than Clinton. For much of the 2020 race, Trump has struggled to land on a single theme to explain why Biden shouldn’t be president, alternating between questioning his mental acuity, blaming him for violence in cities, and being soft on China.

Plus, there has been the absence of bombshell developments that have shifted public opinion.

“The Trump campaign has not run a consistent negative message against Joe Biden that they ran against Hillary Clinton four years ago,” Ayres said. “And they haven’t had the strong assist from outside forces like the James Comey letter and leaked emails that Hillary Clinton had four years ago.”

Even operatives who think Biden’s campaign deserves praise for raising his favorability rating said that Trump’s response to the pandemic and generally relentless push to dominate the news cycle has made it easy on the Democrats.

For instance, Trump mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the popular director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Monday for his poor first pitch at a Washington Nationals baseball game, and suggested during a rally that Biden’s pandemic response plan including listening to Fauci.

The Biden campaign responded on Twitter: “... yes.”

“Even when it’s not about him, it’s about him,” Morales Rocketto said. “It’s like, what’s better than Trump? Anything.”

The Democratic strategist, who is the executive director of Care in Action, a nonprofit group that advocates for domestic workers, emphasized that she thought Biden deserved credit for his campaign, which included reaching out behind the scenes and making many of the party’s vocal activists feel relatively comfortable with his campaign.

Few candidates can possess high favorability numbers with a split ideological base, and in this case, she said that many progressives have come around to Biden’s campaign.

But she added that, in many cases, that unification has also been aided by Trump.

“Part of this is that he has benefited from the fact that many folks on the left are the people who either are or represent the constituencies who will be most affected by a Trump presidency,” Morales Rocketto said. “And they have learned the right lesson from 2016, which is don’t sit on the sidelines. Get in the game.”

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