President Biden’s fiery State of the Union Address to Congress last week didn’t have quite the impact he might have been expecting.
According to a raft of new polls taken in the days following his speech before a joint session of Congress, Biden’s position in the polls against former President Donald Trump hasn’t budged.
“Before the State of the Union, Trump (45%) and Biden (44%) were statistically tied in a head-to-head 2024 matchup, according to the previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll from late January. They remain tied today, with Trump at 46% and Biden at 44% — a gap that’s well within the poll’s margin of error (2.8%),” one group of pollsters wrote.
Biden used his constitutionally mandated report before Congress, his third such address, to draw sharp contrast between his three-year-old administration and the four years before it under Trump. Without naming the 45th President, Biden spoke about life under the leadership of his “predecessor” at least 13 times.
“My predecessor came to office determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned, and he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has resulted,” Biden said early in his speech.
“A president, my predecessor failed in the most basic presidential duty that he owes to the American people: the duty to care,” he said later.
Despite Biden’s attempts to spell out the sharp differences he sees between his campaign and his opponent’s — both of which were able to mathematically secure their respective party nominations Tuesday night — it doesn’t seem voters were convinced, if they were even watching.
Pollsters with Forbes/HarrisX found that, of 2,017 registered voters they spoke with, 52% prefer the former president to the incumbent. That’s unchanged from a similar sized poll conducted in late February.
About 6 out of 10 surveyed voters said Biden’s speech only served to further divide an already partisan electorate, and nearly as many said the speech raised further concerns about Biden’s age, though more than half said they hadn’t had a chance to see the speech or watch clips. At 81-years-old, Biden is the oldest person to seek the presidency (followed only by his 77-year-old opponent).
A survey conducted by The Economist/YouGov of nearly 1,200 U.S. adults who say they read about or watched at least part of the speech found just under half — 48% — had a positive opinion of Biden’s address. Around 43% had a negative reaction to the speech, and 8% said they were “unsure.”
Around four out of five viewers said the State of the Union confirmed what they “already think” and 8% said it changed their minds in some way. About a third of those polled said it was “one of the worst” State of the Union addresses they had ever seen. About 25% said they had not seen any part of the speech.
“Joe Biden received no bump in support from his State of the Union address and the majority of Americans think it served to ‘divide further the country,’” Trump’s campaign said in a message highlighting the polling.
Trump sporadically responded to the State of the Union on his Truth Social media site, though the webservice crashed several times during the speech, calling Biden’s address “may be the Angriest, Least Compassionate, and Worst State of the Union Speech ever made. It was an Embarrassment to our Country!”
At this point in the 2020 race, according to RealClearPolitics, then-candidate Biden was beating then-President Trump by an average of 6.3 points. In March of 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was up against Trump by the exact same amount.