There Is No Precedent for How Bad Biden’s Polls Are Right Now

As President Joe Biden grows increasingly mystified by his unpopularity, he is also experiencing the worst polling of his presidency. This plummet was punctuated by last Thursday’s release of several Bloomberg/Morning Consult surveys showing him getting swept in a series of battleground states. Then, on Tuesday, yet another New York Times/Siena College survey showed former President Donald Trump beating Biden nationally and, perhaps most shockingly, with young voters. Now that the contact high of the most recent Democratic election overperformance in November’s off-year contests has worn off, genuine fear has set in among both Democratic insiders and the rank and file as the president trails Trump by 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average.

Precisely how scared Democrats should be about Biden’s standing depends on how his plight compares with those of presidents past. And there’s no sugarcoating it: This might be the worst polling environment for an incumbent president one year out from an election since the advent of the polling era in the 1930s and also the most dire situation facing any Democratic presidential candidate in decades. Panic is entirely warranted.

It’s worth noting that the universe of polling around an incumbent president’s reelection chances is an extremely small sample size. When people make confident claims about the relationship between polling data and outcomes with incumbent presidents, they are largely talking about a whopping 12 post-WWII cases. To make it even harder to draw firm conclusions, as recently as the 1990s (what my students adorably refer to as “the late 1900s”), there were no polling aggregators like RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight because there were not that many surveys, especially this far out from an election.

So in order to evaluate Biden’s standing against his likely challenger and compare that to past incumbents with similar data inputs, we’re really stuck with an even smaller sample size, and looking at only three cases in the 21^st century: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. That said, even this compressed comparison is unflattering for the president.

At this stage in the 2004 cycle, while there are no archived head-to-head polling averages—because eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry was not the expected favorite at the time—there were a smattering of polls that tested various Democratic contenders against George W. Bush. A September 2003 CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey had Kerry up 1 point over Bush, but an October Newsweek poll had Bush leading Kerry by 6, and a November Time/CNN poll found Bush leading his potential contenders, including Kerry, handily, by between 8 and 13 points. A December 2003 CBS poll didn’t ask about Kerry but showed then–front-runner Howard Dean down a staggering 20 points to Bush, pre-scream. I think it’s safe to say that the balance of the evidence had Bush leading the race at this point. In late 2011, incumbent Democrat Barack Obama led the RealClearPolitics average over Mitt Romney by 1.8 points in an election he would ultimately win by 3.9. And on Dec. 18, 2019, Biden led Trump by 4.4 points, which was almost the exact final margin in 2020.

In other words, this century’s incumbent presidents really haven’t had any dramatic shifts of the magnitude that Biden needs to win next November’s election, especially keeping in mind that most analysts believe a small popular vote victory for the president will result in an Electoral College defeat, like Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.

It gets worse. In his approval ratings, too, compared with his incumbent predecessors, Biden is likewise off on an island, in all the wrong ways. Bush was sporting 58 percent favorability at this stage in the 2004 cycle, with nearly a 21-point net favorability. Obama was at 45 percent with a net negative approval of -4 points. (Of course, both went on to win their elections.) Trump was at 44 percent and -8.8 net approval, and we all know what happened there. Biden as of this writing is averaging just 40.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, with a net -15.4—nearly twice as bad as Trump on net. In other words, Biden isn’t just worse off than the presidents who were reelected this century. He’s in a considerably more grim position than the one who lost his second campaign by 7 million votes.

Democrats may be tempted to soothe themselves with the fact that that is just three elections. But even if we widen the aperture a little bit to the older races where, again, the density of data is much lower, things hardly look any better for Biden. George H.W. Bush maintained an approval rating over 50 percent in Gallup surveys throughout 1991, in the run-up to his unsuccessful 1992 reelection bid. And Bill Clinton, who was reelected handily, was at 51 percent at this point in 1995. So while there have been presidents who lost their bids despite positive approval ratings at this stage (like Jimmy Carter in late 1979), there is not a ton of precedent for a sitting president being this unpopular, according to public opinion surveys 11 months out from reelection, and coming back to win a second term. Sorry, folks, but not even Harry Truman did it; he was at 52 percent approval in a Gallup survey from December 1947.

One encouraging caveat is that approval ratings themselves are not tightly tied to election outcomes; Democrats performed well in 2022 and 2023 despite Biden’s unpopularity. FiveThirtyEight’s G. Elliott Morris notes that “there are millions of Biden disapprovers who would vote for him if the election were held today” and that expressing dissatisfaction with the president is not necessarily tantamount to a plan to vote against him.

The line from my field of political science is generally that polls tend to get more accurate as the election draws nearer. According to political scientist David Lazer, “historically, this far out, it’s just not predictive.” Many will tell you that factors like economic conditions and the unemployment rate are better predictors of what will happen a year from now than polls. But many of these largely economic models failed badly in 2020, when the extraordinarily bad economic conditions ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic pointed to a massive loss for Donald Trump and the Republicans. One Oxford Economics model predicted a 35 percent vote share for Trump. Another, political scientist Alan Abramowitz’s “Time for Change” model, had to basically throw out all of the economic data to avoid predicting an FDR-style landslide for Biden.

A lot of the data that informs this conventional wisdom about polling is from the pre-polarization era, when support for a presidential candidate could swing substantially based on unfolding events. That’s how, for example, Jimmy Carter went from wiping out his GOP challenger Ronald Reagan in 1979 polling to getting handed one of the worst defeats ever for a sitting president. By contrast, today some researchers argue that our era of heightened partisan polarization is beginning to erode the predictive nature of economic conditions on election outcomes.

It is hard to understand, for example, why Democrats in opposition to Trump won a huge national popular vote margin in the 2018 midterm elections during one of the most robust economic booms in American history, nor for that matter how or why Democrats were able to come within a few close House races of maintaining their trifecta in 2022 despite the headwinds of inflation and interest rate hikes. As Christopher Ellis and Joseph Daniel Ura argued in a 2020 research paper, under conditions of sharp polarization, “elections will tend to be shaped by underlying distributions of party loyalties rather than objective evaluations of incumbents’ performance in office.”

That is not great news for analysts hoping that improving economic conditions will change perceptions of the economy and thus Biden’s fortunes in time for next November. The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last wrote hopefully on Friday that if one assumes that consumer sentiment will continue to improve and that there will be no recurrence of inflation, “as the electorate’s economic views catch up with the facts on the ground, Biden’s support will also recover.” But what if voters come around on their views of the economy and still want to cashier Biden for Trump?

That’s the outcome predicted by the available data today. Taken together, the picture painted by horse-race polling and approval ratings makes Biden possibly the most vulnerable incumbent president since scientific polling was invented. Think of it this way: There have been incumbents with some bad head-to-head polling against likely challengers and some with poor approval ratings at various points in the year before the election. But the only incumbent president with both approval ratings and head-to-head polling anywhere near this bad at this stage of the race was Donald Trump, who went on to lose.

And there is no precedent in the polling era for a Democratic candidate, either as incumbent or challenger, to be this far underwater in terms of approval ratings and head-to-head polling. Not Kerry, who maintained positive approval ratings throughout the campaign. Not Democrats who got waxed in the general election, like Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and George McGovern, all of whom enjoyed high public favorability ratings to the bitter end. Is Biden really in worse shape than McGovern, who went on to lose 520–17 in the Electoral College, or Mondale, who carried only his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C.? Surely not; the deepening of partisanship sets Biden’s Electoral College floor much, much higher than it was in the past. There’s no sense in denying, though, that Biden looks distinctively like an underdog in a way that no Democrat has at this point since at least 1984.

There is still plenty of time for wavering Democrats to come home, for perceptions of the economy to change for the better, and for the magnitude of the threat that Trump poses to American democracy to sink in and clarify the choice for persuadable voters. That scenario feels plausible, and it might even explain the inexplicable lack of urgency inside the president’s campaign. But if Biden is to stage a comeback from the bleak public opinion landscape he faces today, he will truly be making history.