President Biden’s approval rating in his first days in office is higher than Donald Trump ever achieved during his four years as president, two new polls have found. A Morning Consult tracking poll published Monday found that 56 percent of voters approve of Biden’s job performance, while 34 percent disapprove. At the same early juncture of Trump’s presidency, 46 percent of Americans polled said they approved of his job performance, and the polling high point for his term in office came in March 2017, when his approval rating hit 52 percent. A second poll, conducted by Hill-HarrisX and also released on Monday, put Biden’s approval rating at 63 percent, while 37 percent said they disapprove of the job he was doing so far. Trump, by contrast, reached an approval rating high of 52 percent in an April 2020 survey by the same pollster. The kickoff to Biden’s presidential term has been marked by a series of executive orders that have aimed to either correct or overturn policies put in place by executive orders signed by Trump, including rejoining the Paris climate accord, rescinding a ban on transgender troops from serving in the U.S. military and lifting a ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim and African countries. In part, the swift reversal of controversial Trump policies has solidified Biden’s standing with his party. The Morning Consult poll found that 91 percent of Democrats approve of Biden’s job performance, compared with just 4 percent of Democrats who disapprove and 5 percent who said they have no opinion. At this same juncture in Trump’s presidency, 83 percent of Republicans said they approved of his job performance. Biden is also doing better than Trump with independent voters, the Morning Consult poll found. While 49 percent said they approve of Biden’s early job performance, 34 percent said they disapprove. The approval figure is 8 points higher than what Trump notched four years ago. Of course, both tracking polls are merely a snapshot at the start of what may prove a difficult year for the country. Biden himself has predicted that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic still lies ahead, with deaths from COVID-19 poised to top 500,000 next month and the economy still crippled due to the pandemic. Biden has used orders meant to address the pandemic, but with the evenly divided U.S. Senate in gridlock, a new stimulus package to help Americans remains elusive. Executive orders, which have become commonplace in an era of partisan congressional gridlock, go only so far in addressing the big problems faced by the nation. As a result, their impact on a president’s approval rating can be short-lived. When Trump began his term as president in January 2017, Gallup measured his approval rating at 45 percent. In early 2020, shortly after the Senate voted to acquit him on impeachment charges, he hit an approval rating high of 49 percent for his presidency. But the week before he left office, his approval had fallen to just 34 percent, and Gallup noted that “his 41% average approval rating throughout his presidency is four points lower than for any of his predecessors.” Gallup has yet to release its first poll tracking Biden’s approval rating.
Trump never reached 54% in 538s aggregate polling his entire presidency.He never even reached 50%. Bidens net approval is +19.Trumps last net approval was -19
We already have the first hint of President Joe Biden’s popularity at the earliest stage of his presidency: The FiveThirtyEight estimate has him at 54.2% approval and 34.7% disapproval. The most obvious comparison is to former President Donald Trump, who never came close to those numbers. He started out in 2017 at 44.1% approval and 42.2% disapproval. That was close to the best rating of his presidency, and his disapproval marks rapidly moved above 50% and stayed there. Trump started lower; President Barack Obama started higher. The other recent presidents, from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, started more or less in the same approval range that Biden occupies now. Before Reagan and the current era of partisan polarization, newly elected presidents typically started out quite a bit more popular. Jimmy Carter, for example, registered 66% approval at the earliest stage of his presidency, and actually spiked up higher before things started to unravel. That kind of early surge has been fairly common for newly elected presidents during the polling era, from Dwight Eisenhower on. Only Trump, Obama and George H.W. Bush failed to improve on their initial rating at some point during their first 100 days, and Bush’s rating rose soon after that marker. So we shouldn’t assume that Biden’s mid-50s approval will mark a peak. On the downside for Biden, his mid-30s disapproval number is the second-worst of the polling era, beating only Trump. We can almost certainly attribute that to partisan polarization rather than to anything Biden did. Early-term disapproval has been rising steadily over the last several presidencies. Whether this means that Biden will face a low ceiling or not is unknown, but if he ever is to reach the point where two-thirds approve of the job that he’s doing as president, as most polling-era presidents have at least briefly, he’ll need to convert some people who started off actively opposed to him. That’s presumably a lot harder than picking up support from those who start out neutral. It does appear that Biden is taking the popular side of quite a few issues early in his administration. HuffPost and Morning Consult have polled on many of the topics of his executive actions, and all of them have either plurality or majority support in those surveys. It also seems likely that the major elements of his first legislative package will poll well — direct broad-based relief payments have polled well over the last year, for example, and I would guess an overwhelming majority supports spending on delivering vaccines and other efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. We’ll see if those things remain popular, and whether any of them pass into law. In the longer run, however, it’s policy outcomes that will determine Biden’s popularity, not what people think of his policy proposals. Do early approval ratings matter? In one way, they do not: Early approval ratings do not predict how things will look when it’s time for midterm congressional and state races or the president’s re-election. They do matter to some extent now, however. For one thing, a president who is perceived as popular will tend to have a better bargaining position when dealing with members of Congress, interest groups, executive-branch bureaucrats and others. For another, a popular president will help his or her party recruit candidates and depress recruitment for the out-party; an unpopular president has the opposite effect. In general, candidates are not as important as they once were to electoral success, but parties would still rather have their popular incumbents run for another term and their best potential candidates step up to run. Recruitment for state-level 2022 elections is well underway, and has started for contests for the U.S. House of Representatives.