“He cannot win because he has the worst approval ratings of any President”. This line irks me whether it comes from a talking head on TV, a columnist, or even a comment on this site. An approval rating is not a substitution for electability. You can disapprove of a President because you never liked him, or you can disapprove because he has not achieved what you hope for, or disapprove because gas prices are high, or disapprove because a decision affects you personally. But election time comes and you know that the alternative would be far worse.
This statement also disregards changes in how voters have responded to this question. Paul Krugman had this to say about our response (paywall) in the Times to the current economy:
The economy is good, but Americans feel bad about it. Or do they? The more I look into it, the more I’m convinced that much of what looks like poor public perception about the economy is actually just Republicans angry that Donald Trump isn’t still president.
The same sentiment applies to approval ratings as the graph above shows.
The numbers are from the American Presidency Project. There are graphs which break it out into presidencies, but I want to look at the trends. (You can see where both Bush the elder and Bush the “Mission Accomplished” guy both hit 90 and quickly plummeted.)
But note that prior to Obama, day 25000, there are significant swings in opinion but no large swings afterward. This looks like the start of extreme polarization where we stick by our party no matter how well or bad the current President is. We are less inclined to change our mind with events or performance.
We can get an idea about the long term trend by applying a linear regression fit. It basically draws a straight line through the data such the number of points above and below the line are balanced (roughly speaking).
With the trend lines added to the graph, it easy to see that voters over time are less willing to say that they approve of the President. However, if you lop off the last decade or so, the trend would have stayed fairly constant. The percentage that answered “unsure” dropped quite linearly from 15% down to 4% over the decades. As these two groups trended downward, the percentage of those who viewed the President in a negative light has increased from 22% to hitting 50% now. That is a lot of negatively.
One last graph because graphs are awesome (like here and here). We can remove the trend by adjusting the data in reference to day 15000, the mid-point, allowing comparisons to historical ratings without the trends.
This adjustment bumps up modern-day approvals but especially decreases the disapproval ratings. As such, Joe Biden’s adjusted average approval for his term sits at 51.08% while his disapproval is 37.5%. Not as high as we would like, but above water.
Oh, and one last thing. The crossing of the trend lines, where we can say that more voters view the Presidency negatively than positively, occurs on 7/13/2015, just a couple weeks after Trump announced that he was running for President. Coincidence?