A new Marquette Law School Poll (A/B) finds that while 60% of Republicans want former President Donald Trump (R) to run for president in 2024, 71% of all adults say they do not.
You have probably heard a lot of buzz in the media about how bad President Joe Biden’s (D) approval rating is. It is not good, but it is also not as bad as Trump’s. Marquette finds Biden’s approval rating at 49% with 51% disapproving. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average (see chart below) has Biden’s approval at 43% with 51% disapproving. In the Marquette poll, Trump has an approval rating of 32% with 65% disapproving. Biden’s approval has dropped by double digits since July, but he is still way ahead of Trump.
You can see from the chart below that while Biden’s approval numbers have fallen a little since the summer his disapproval numbers have remained fairly constant. The chart is from FiveThirtyEight and shows Biden’s polling average among all adults.1
Interestingly, Biden’s approval rating has not dropped (or moved at all, for the most part) since September in the Marquette poll. This is roughly consistent with what we see in the polling average. He took two big hits over the summer, both which may not hurt him in the long term. The first was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending America’s 20-year war there. The war was a failure, but no president until Biden was willing to end it. How it ended, however, is the fault of his predecessor who not only ordered a poorly thought-out military drawdown for cynical political and optics reasons (along with a timing that sure seems intended simply to hurt Biden politically) but was responsible for releasing the worst of the Taliban prisoners last year. It is these former prisoners who are now running the country. Republicans have been screaming loudly that Biden screwed up, but he was cleaning up the mess they left. Americans will realize that, although maybe not before 2024 (let alone 2022).
The second hit Biden took this summer was in a reported national hiring slowdown. The initial employment reports from the BLS in July and August showed sluggish growth, suggesting the economy was not coming out of the COVID recession after all. This week, after a shockingly good employment report for October, the BLS revised the summer estimates upward to show that there had been robust hiring during the summer after all. Why?
Those summer numbers were initial estimates – they always are, and they are typically all the media reports. The BLS does not finalize estimates until two months have passed from the initial report, and even then, the results are revised at the end of each year (usually smoothing for seasonal adjustment). The reason for this is that the estimates are based on surveys submitted to and returned from employers. A number of them are always submitted too late for the initial estimate. So, first of all, revisions to employment estimates are normal and done regularly (and always have been done regularly). But there was an additional problem this year that resulted in an unusually late number of survey responses by employers.
According to the Washington Post, the initial response rate pre-pandemic was 60%. By this summer it was 49%. As it turns out, rather than there being a hiring problem, hiring managers were too busy this summer hiring people to return BLS survey responses in a timely manner. It is ironic. The initial job estimates were low because job hiring was more robust than expected. It is the HR folks in businesses that complete the BLS responses; the very same people busy hiring and onboarding new employees. As a result the very high October estimate will probably be estimated downward to a more reasonable - but still good - one. The very low summer estimates were significantly off from the actual hiring experience and likely impacted the responses in October. That is now corrected.2
As these two hits passed in the fall, Biden’s approval rate has relatively stabilized (we see some wide variation among pollsters still). With the implementation of the Infrastructure Bill over the next year, we may see more confidence in Biden in the polling. The economy is much better overall then Republicans are saying – and the media is uncritically repeating. The real problem with the economy is class and racial inequality – something no Republican in today’s party cares about. This inequality can be addressed through Biden’s next big thing: the Build Back Better Bill. However, it has already been pared down to satisfy goal-post movers like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in such a way that it’s impact will be limited.
Today’s Marquette poll is not great for Biden, but it’s a problem for Trump. More than 2/3 of Americans do not like Trump, which does not bode well for another run for the presidency. There are some important caveats, however. We are three years out from Election Day 2024, this poll was of all adults as opposed to registered or likely voters, and it’s just one poll. But it is illustrative of overall popular opinion today.
I am using all adults rather than registered or likely voters to make an apples-to-apples comparison with the Marquette poll, which surveyed all adults. The polling among registered and likely voters is slightly worse for Biden, but not significantly so.
The Washington Post article does a good job of explaining the BLS process, but if you want a more wonky description you can check out this piece I wrote during the Obama Administration about job estimates (when Republicans were complaining that the improving economy had to be a BLS hoax). [Note that the link to my earlier piece has been updated to take you directly to it.]