Biden approval ratings thread, 1.0

[pbrower2a]

We don't know what 2022 will hold but boarder security is also vital to Immigration reform, Biden stopped building the wall but he has plenty of time to restart the wall, D's can certainly win without the boarder fense but they will be in even better position if Biden restarts the wall as AZ, NV and NH are keys to holding on Majority.  WC and AA supports a boarder wall except for Latinos. We haven't gotten to Immigration reform yet

We also don't know how the Economy is gonna be next summer, hopefully it will be in Recovery

Budget buster or rich source of jobs?

[pbrower2a]

Nothing by Quinnipiac for the last two weeks. It is also about time for those on-line 50-state polls by Morning Consult or Civiqs or whatever, don't you think?

[pbrower2a]

Here's a reminder of how one of those 50-state threads could look (this is from November 2019):

Crayons out for Morning Consult.

90% shades -- 20% or more either way
70% shades 10-19%
50% shades-- 5-9%
20% shades -- under 5%
...white would be for ties (but there are none).

Is any comment necessary here?

Every state was shown for Trump approval and disapproval, Although approval numbers can change, they generally give some idea of how the next election involving an incumbent will go if nothing really changes. Roughly a year before the 2020 Presidential election, approval numbers suggested that Trump would lose. Some states did move toward Trump: Iowa, which projected to be a fairly strong D state in a year would be the opposite. Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would be much closer than the map showed. Ohio was not going to be a Trump loss. We would not have known that in late 2019.
 
Obviously, some things will change. I'm not offering a projection based on states being analogues of others 

[pbrower2a]

Imagine Mr. Trump's Twitter if he had such numbers. Just sayin'.

Honestly, if he had simply handled covid right he might’ve seen similar numbers.  Maybe even higher.

If he had just taken it seriously from the beginning, been upfront and truthful with the American people (because it’s now proven that he knew how bad it was early on), encouraged masks and precautions, and not called it a hoax or disregarded the safety of those around him (by ordering his handlers to drive him around when he had covid and hosting large gatherings)....if he had just been honest and aggressive in his encouragement of precautions and attempted to reassure the public...he would probably have been re-elected.

This was/is a large scale crisis where strong leadership is required and rewarded. He failed.

If Trump had had numbers in February 2020 as Obama had had in February 2012 (high 40's), then he too would have won much the same.

[pbrower2a]

Imagine Mr. Trump's Twitter if he had such numbers. Just sayin'.

Honestly, if he had simply handled covid right he might’ve seen similar numbers.  Maybe even higher.

If he had just taken it seriously from the beginning, been upfront and truthful with the American people (because it’s now proven that he knew how bad it was early on), encouraged masks and precautions, and not called it a hoax or disregarded the safety of those around him (by ordering his handlers to drive him around when he had covid and hosting large gatherings)....if he had just been honest and aggressive in his encouragement of precautions and attempted to reassure the public...he would probably have been re-elected.

This was/is a large scale crisis where strong leadership is required and rewarded. He failed.

If Trump had had numbers in February 2020 as Obama had had in February 2012 (high 40's), then he too would have won much the same.

Maybe.

But I think if he had truly stepped up to the plate, as any good leader would have, and went to bat for us and the country as a whole I think he might've won by a large margin.  Maybe landslides are impossible now, but I think his re-election would've been (more than) pretty secure.

He wouldn't have reached Bush approvals post-9/11...but in March 2020 he had an extraordinary opportunity to boost his leadership image in the face of an overwhelming crisis.

He has no one to blame for his 2020 defeat except himself and his terrible response to covid; a response which cost thousands more lives than necessary.  There is no doubt that Trump's inaction cost more American lives from covid than those who died on 9/11.

We will never know what a competent response to COVID-19 would have done for President Trump. He might have gotten a majority of the popular vote. He had a reasonably-good chance of picking up Maine at large (but not ME-01), Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire.

All that he had to do was to treat COVID-19 as seriously as a war. He could have asked people to wear masks. He could have praised Big Business for good work and rewarded it with tax cuts.

The worst days of death from COVID-19 were worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. I cannot forgive him. I don't know what he was thinking... and I am not sure that I want to know.

I'm going to make a prediction: that the US will need to do another Census just to keep track of the effects of COVID-19 on the population. What were the demographics of those damned to the plague of 2020-21? 

[pbrower2a]

PBrower would be touting Obama as the new FDR in 2009.

I did. 2009 wasn't exactly  a parallel to 1933. 

[pbrower2a]

Here's how to win the war. Yes, it is a war; people are dying. Death by COVID-19 is as absurd as death by small arms fire, artillery, or airstrikes.

[pbrower2a]

Florida - Mason-Dixon
February 24-28
625 registered voters
MoE: 4%

Disapprove 49%
Approve 47%

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/410602-poll-shows-support-but-vulnerability-for-marco-rubio

This is just hilarious.

Shows what we all know:  Florida is a red state.

 

Still close to the electoral result, and better than for Biden in 2020.  This narrow margin still bodes ill for the GOP because Biden will be running on his record, and the anti-Communist smear against Biden and Democrats in general in Florida in 2020 will not be so effective in 2024. Biden is not going to kiss up to Maduro or Raul Castro, so Republicans will not have that attack available.

St. Leo is really a lousy pollster anyway.

49% approval usually wins in a state if such is so at the beginning of the election year.  

New Hampshire, St. Anselm's College. Biden approval 50%, disapproval 49%:

strongly disapprove  43
somewhat disapprove 6
somewhat approve  15
strongly approve 50


https://www.anselm.edu/sites/default/files/Images/NHIOP/SACSurveyBook321.pdf#page=13

GA (Trafalgar/InsiderAdvantage)

41% approve
56% disapprove

MO (Remington)

43% approve
53% disapprove

Trashing Trafalgar but taking Remington. No way is Biden doing that badly in Georgia. It's likely closer to 50-50. I wouldn't be surprised if we got a new and credible poll involving Georgia soon. We see little from Missouri, and beggars can't be choosers.

Seventeen states; one more makes it one third if you count Dee Cee as a state for all practical purposes in the 2024 election.

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

*an asterisk indicates that I have accepted a favorability rating.  New York State only.

[pbrower2a]

Are you seriously trashing Trafalgar after 2020?

If I can trash St. Leo polls, I can reject Trashy Fallacious Garbage polls too.

The success of a pollster usually relates in any year above all else to what electorate turns out. If the liberal-leaning potential voters of the electorate fail to come out to vote, then at the extreme the most conservative pollsters such as Rasmussen are right. If the liberal-leaning marginal voters come out to vote or the conservative-leaning pollsters fail to come out to vote, then such liberal-leaning pollsters as Quinnipiac are right.

Years for voting beginning in 2000, based on liberal-to-conservative:

2008
2006
2018
2012
2020
2016
2000
2004
2002
2014
2010

If you have some other idea of how to order those years, then tell me. Better yet, I am starting a thread in the Electoral Trends area, where your opinions might be relevant as those seat-of-the-pants guesses are over twenty years and eleven elections. 

[pbrower2a]

Selzer just polled Iowa on approval of its two Senators. Both Grassley and Ernst are slipping. That has little relevance for Ernst, who will be around until 2026 due to the 2020 election that she won. But Iowans seem to want Chuck Grassley to retire at the end of his term.

Should there be a Presidential approval poll in Iowa the results could be interesting. I was reading for that, but... well it wasn't there this time.

[pbrower2a]

Ernst is blocking Biden agenda, the voters didn't put her in office again to Obstruct

Iowa voters expected her to well serve the Trump Presidency, according to their 2020 vote. 

[pbrower2a]

The stimulus can solve lots of problems, including jump-starting the economy and making people feel good again.

Wars cost money, and Biden is willing to spend the money to win the war.

[pbrower2a]

NY - Siena College
March 8-12
805 registered voters
MoE: 4.1%

Excellent 28%
Good 26%
Fair 18%
Poor 23%

I still prefer a favorability poll to one like this that has an ambiguous response and only one unambiguously-derogatory but two laudatory categories.

[pbrower2a]

Iowa and New Hampshire were close to each other from 2000 to 2012 in voting.

[pbrower2a]

Iowa Republicans took a big gamble on COVID-19, and that gamble paid off well... to providers of mortuary services. Iowa Republicans could have acted like Ohio Republicans, and this would have saved them. I recognize of course that political opinion in Iowa can swing like the weather in a climatic zone exposed to nearly everything. But this is a bad poll for the Iowa GOP, which will have a Senate seat up for contest. This poll suggests that Iowa is practically back in tandem with Wisconsin, which has similar demographics. Being a toady of Donald Trump after he was defeated and then disgraced as no other President has been might not be good for political survival in a state that has been moderately liberal in recent times.

OK, watch for an Ohio poll. Ohio voted in tandem with Iowa in the 2016 and 2020 elections, but its Republican Governor bucked Donald Trump on COVID-19. 

[pbrower2a]

Massachusetts: UMass-Amherst, March 5-9, 800 adults

Approve 62
Disapprove 34

Other approvals:

Gov. Charlie Baker: 52/39
Sen. Edward Markey: 53/30
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: 55/34
MA state legislature: 51/31
U.S. Congress: 33/57

Oregon, DHM Research. March 7-14.

I am going to take "positive" as a surrogate for "approve" and "negative" as a surrogate for "disapprove".

President Joe Biden:

Strong positive 28%
Somewhat positive 25%
Somewhat negative 12%
Strong negative 28%

Don't know 7%

Biden does about as well with white people as with "people of color"; he is strong in the Portland metropolitan area and to a slightly lesser extent in the Willamette Valley; outside of that (the thinly-populated coast and the areas east of the Cascades) not so well.   He does better among college-educated people than among others, sort-of-OK among voters over 65 or under 30, but well among the rest.

The Democratic Governor's approvals are not so great. 38% positive, 56% negative, so she (Kate Brown) has her work cut out for her for getting re-elected.

https://www.dhmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/DHM-Panel_data-release-1-March-2021.pdf

 

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

*an asterisk indicates that I have accepted a favorability rating.  New York State only.

[pbrower2a]

Wow, even the dumbest state in the union approves of our President!
https://twitter.com/_dinger_s/status/1371494001329770500?s=21

Maybe but it is also possible (and probably more likely) than their poll is simply oversampling left leaning voters.

The question is often "who will vote", and on that, pollsters can be very wrong. Sometimes a big chunk of the electorate can get confused about what it wants and decide to not vote.

I wouldn't read more into a poll than what it says. I can see other possibilities:

1. Iowa is amenable to populists. Love him or hate him, Trump ran populist campaigns. A populist campaign from the Left could win in Iowa against some staid or stale pol.

2. Donald Trump found a way to relate to Iowa. My suspicion is that the more that people knew about Trump in 2016, the less that they liked him. This explains why he did so badly in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Usually if one is from somewhere, one has some positive connection to the local culture.

3. Iowa swings wildly in polling. I could show you times when I was convinced that Trump would lose Iowa  in 2020 (this was during the trade war in which China threatened to buy far fewer agricultural commodities from American farmers. That was going to hurt Trump's chances in winning Iowa and Ohio. At that point, Trump had disapproval ratings in the mid-50's in Ohio and near 60 in Iowa. One does not win with those numbers.

Trump opened the spigot on farm subsidies, which is good politics... but horrible public policy. You do not want your politicians using the treasury to buy votes. You want more practical measures of solving problems. Give up on the trade war, maybe?

4. It is not certain that Joe Biden will be a steady-hand leader, but if he is, then his approval ratings can stick even if they are narrow margins. Changing one's policies capriciously is a bad sign.

5. Republican pols handled COVID-19 badly. Iowa pols wanted the riverboat gambling casinos to stay busy and generate revenue... never mind that people would contract COVID-19 there. Contrast Michigan, which practically shut down its casinos

   

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1371588922854273037?s=20

Interesting for showing an occupational group.

[pbrower2a]

We are still paying attention to polls 20 mnths befote an Election, Biden isn't 40 Percent Trump

Trump was upside down 43 47 not 47/43

It's one way of assessing performance. Personal opinions are often quite wrong due to partisan bias.

[pbrower2a]

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/03/16/new-poll-shows-cuban-american-voters-align-with-gop-1368365

Biden favourability rating among Cuban Americans
45% favourable
51% unfavourable


- Trump has a 62% favourability rating, same as the share of the vote he got in 2020
- Hardline attitudes against Cuba are back according to this poll

Trump and the Florida GOP scared the North Korea* out of Cuban-Americans with  accusations that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Congressional Democrats would go light on Raul Castro and Nicolas Maduro. That message may have stuck. Rapacious hypocrite that Donald Trump is, he'd probably love to set up a Trump resort in Havana with gambling casinos run by his Russian buddies if he got the opportunity.

*That is a sort of Hell, is it not?

[pbrower2a]

Gallup, March 1-15, 1010 adults (1-month change)

Approve 54 (-2)
Disapprove 42 (+2)

It is obviously far too early to tell whether this approval rating will hold, but should it hold President Biden is looking into an electoral victory in which he gets about 400 electoral votes. This is the zone in which the President gets 53-57% of the popular vote, and President Biden would look into an Eisenhower-scale win in popular votes.

President Biden has so far dodged controversy well. It is still early. Nobody successfully dodges controversy predictably and reliably as President.

Trump was never at this level, and if it isn't quite near the top for Obama, it is within the Obama range. Obama got re-elected decisively.

[pbrower2a]

Gallup, March 1-15, 1010 adults (1-month change)

Approve 54 (-2)
Disapprove 42 (+2)

It is obviously far too early to tell whether this approval rating will hold, but should it hold President Biden is looking into an electoral victory in which he gets about 400 electoral votes. This is the zone in which the President gets 53-57% of the popular vote, and President Biden would look into an Eisenhower-scale win in popular votes.

President Biden has so far dodged controversy well. It is still early. Nobody successfully dodges controversy predictably and reliably as President.

Trump was never at this level, and if it isn't quite near the top for Obama, it is within the Obama range. Obama got re-elected decisively.

Obama also had an awful first midterm that basically made it so he couldn’t get anything of consequence done for the rest of his Presidency and greased the wheels for someone like Trump to succeed him with a fully Republican congress.

Well known. Obama was a great President in 2009 and most of 2010, but mediocre after that. He was able to stop people who concur with the idea that the "Golden Rule" is as the late oil billionaire H. Lamar Hunt put it, "He who owns the gold makes the rules" in politics.

The Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress are far shakier now than they were in 2009, and the heels of American politics and business are well-heeled.-It is yet to be shown whether they can buy enough stooges to transform the USA into a pure plutocracy once and for all. The Trump cult is alive and well.

[pbrower2a]

The Ds Majority is far shakier but we are living in a Covid Environment, the turnout was 33% in 2010/2014, minorities took things for granted, in a Covid Environment VBM including the Cali recall, they aren't gonns take things for granted and turnout may equal to Prez race in a VBM not same day voting

Elections often boil down to turnout. Republicans would be wise to treat from Trump's handling of COVID-19... but many can't, having taken the callowest possible approach to the pandemic. The negative ads practically create themselves:

(somber, funereal music)

Governor X had the chance to make his state less of a playground for COVID-19. He thought he could make his state a playground for people who wanted to be free from sane measures in other states. They came, they got sick

(cut to a flat-lining vital signals on a monitor)

and they died. Here or there? It's just the same.

...and people got sick and died here, too.

If we can't trust Governor X on a matter of life and death, then what can we trust him on?

 

[pbrower2a]

There are lessons to be learned about 2010.

1. Do not assume t he repetition of history based on analogues. 2010 looked as if it would be a replay of 1934 to a President who modeled himself much like FDR. It was not a perfect analogue. In 1934 the "economic royalists" were still concerned with the survival of their businesses and weren't going to waste money on political campaigns. In 2010 investment in political campaigns could pay off richly as the elites could find willing stooges to do the political dirty work.

2. It will have been only twelve years since 2010, so expect people who know what they are doing to do what succeeded the last time, perhaps refining the process. The rapacious elites of 2010 still want Americans to endure Scandinavian costs of living on African wages, and if they can get that they will have maximized profit.

3. Mitch McConnell has already telescoped much of the agenda: a national right-to-work law that would eviscerate labor unions so that workers would be helpless against rapacious, all-powerful economic elites, gutting of whatever environmental regulations that there are (they might remain, but only to stifle competition), and more support of privatization of the public sector. It's mirror-image Marxism that creates a Hell for workers -- but the economic elites are much lauded for building castles and palaces while the common people get cold and hungry.

4. America has a heritage of greedy plutocrats who treat workers as badly as possible. It was called slavery. It infested 'only' the agrarian South, but as has been shown elsewhere (most infamously Nazi Germany) industrial workers can also be transformed into serfs unable to contest the power of plutocrats, Do not be fooled: all that prevents something horrible (and it need not have militarism or racial-religious genocide attached). Nazi Germany might be too far along as an ideology, except that the US could become a militaristic police state. Think of Pinochet's Chile, in which dissidents were murdered after torture.

Empathy is not part of the requisite of character of America's plutocrats and executives. Our economic elites are an exclusive club who want no competition even from small business, let alone labor unions in challenging pay and conditions or any consequences of a political arena.

What those elites do not want is apocalyptic war which replaces a ruthless American elite with a similarly-rapacious Russian or Chinese elite. It surprises me that German tycoons and executives did not face the same consequences for exploitation of prisoners in the camps (aside from expropriation in central and Balkan Europe, and damage from air rai8ds and consequences of land war) as the administrators and guards in such camps.

5. Donald Trump still has a cult that sees nothing wrong with despotic government that agrees with them on cultural issues and cannot accept political defeat. Should Trump become irrelevant, then someone else will offer much the same agenda with a different set of personal quirks. Maybe he will be more cautious about using vile language. Maybe that pol will offer more overt religious devotion and a less sordid personal life with no sleazy business dealings. That Trump got away with irreligion, a pattern of sexual perversion that mocks the more conservative values of most Americans, and a pattern of fraud in taxes and business dealings should warn us of the hazard of someone 'cleaner'.  The danger of Donald Trump is not in his raw language, his acceptance of a more conventional form of religious devotion ("The Bible says it; I believe it; believe it or burn!) of the fundamentalist Protestant type, who may have been sexually loyal to one spouse from early adulthood, his one-sided business dealings that cheat investors and leave subcontractors in worse shape than before they had dealings with him; it is that he really believes that the common man exists solely to make those already filthy-rich even more filthy rich while living on the edge of hunger, exposure, and homelessness. Trump has his dream of a social order in which the poor (and that includes people heavily in debt with no easy way of getting out from under it) owe everything to those who owe the common man nothing. The GOP has plenty of imaginable candidates who have Trump's economic ideology without the personal abominations.

The political struggle for the dignity of Humanity is far from decided in America. A political equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition based upon economic orthodoxy could be just as brutal as the original in which one could burn at the stake for having a family get-together that has some resemblance to a Seder has not become impossible. The worst deeds that people have ever done have been in the pretense of righteousness; even the Nazis thought they were doing a great service to Humanity through the Holocaust. America's economic elites are consummately ruthless... and convinced of their rectitude. Give them the power that they think that they deserve, and America will be a nightmare in which the kindest thing that one could do for a newborn child (if one is poor) is to offer that child for a foreign adoption. 

[pbrower2a]

Massachusetts: UMass-Amherst, March 5-9, 800 adults

Approve 62
Disapprove 34

Other approvals:

Gov. Charlie Baker: 52/39
Sen. Edward Markey: 53/30
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: 55/34
MA state legislature: 51/31
U.S. Congress: 33/57

Quinnipiac, New York

March 16-17
905 registered voters
MoE: 3.3%

Cuomo approval: 39% approve, 48% disapprove (-9)
Cuomo favorability: 33% favorable, 51% unfavorable (-28)
Should Cuomo run for reelection?: 25% Yes, 66% No
Should Cuomo resign?: 43% Yes, 49% No
Should Cuomo be impeached?: 36% Yes, 54% No

Biden approval: 59/35 (+24)
Schumer approval: 50/40 (+10)
Gillibrand approval: 44/33 (+11)

https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/ny/ny03182021_nktj17.pdf

Clearly a Republican leaning sample, so take this poll with a grain of salt.

Well, it is our first approvaal poll of New York State.  


Oregon, DHM Research. March 7-14.

I am going to take "positive" as a surrogate for "approve" and "negative" as a surrogate for "disapprove". We have few polls of Oregon even in electoral heats, so we beggars can't be choosers.

President Joe Biden:

Strong positive 28%
Somewhat positive 25%
Somewhat negative 12%
Strong negative 28%

Don't know 7%

Biden does about as well with white people as with "people of color"; he is strong in the Portland metropolitan area and to a slightly lesser extent in the Willamette Valley; outside of that (the thinly-populated coast and the areas east of the Cascades) not so well.   He does better among college-educated people than among others, sort-of-OK among voters over 65 or under 30, but well among the rest.

The Democratic Governor's approvals are not so great. 38% positive, 56% negative, so she (Kate Brown) has her work cut out for her for getting re-elected.

https://www.dhmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/DHM-Panel_data-release-1-March-2021.pdf

 

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York Rhode Island or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

*an asterisk indicates that I have accepted a favorability rating.  New York State only.