Democrats, lukewarm on Biden in campaign, love him as president
The cliché has it that when it comes to picking their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love. But the party’s primary race last year was hardly a great political romance: Joe Biden drew less than 21% of the Democratic vote in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses, and a dismal 8.4% in the New Hampshire primary.
While Biden went on to win his party’s nomination, he was never widely seen as capturing the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton once did. For many of his supporters, he seemed simply like their best chance to defeat a president — Donald Trump — who inspired far more passion than he did.
Yet in the first few months of his administration, Biden has garnered almost universal approval from members of his party, according to polls, emerging as a kind of man-for-all-democrats after an election year riddled with intraparty squabbling.
He began his term this winter with an approval rating of 98% among Democrats, according to Gallup. This represents a remarkable measure of partisan consensus — outpacing even the strongest moments of Republican unity during the presidency of Trump, whose political brand depended heavily on the devotion of his GOP base.
And as Biden nears his 100th day in office, most public polls have consistently shown him retaining the approval of more than 9 in 10 Democrats nationwide.
Pollsters and political observers mostly agree that Biden’s popularity among
members of his party is driven by a combination of their gratitude to him for getting Trump out of office and their sense that Biden has refused to compromise on major Democratic priorities.
“He has this ability to appeal to all factions of the party, which is no surprise to the centrists but somewhat of a surprise to the progressives,” Patrick Murray, director of polling at Monmouth University, said.
During the primary, Biden was the establishment figure, a Washington centrist in a diverse field that included a number of younger and more progressive rivals. While he won a plurality of Democrats, he struggled to win support from the party’s younger and more liberal voters.
But as president, he has been governing much like a progressive, without abandoning his longtime public identity as a moderate.
“He has found a winning formula, at least for now,” said David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Obama. “His tone and tenure reassure moderates, and his agenda thrills progressives.”
To that end, Biden has avoided taking up liberals’ most politically thorny proposals — like expanding the Supreme Court or canceling $1 trillion in student debt — while sticking to a public posture of bipartisan outreach and measured language. But his policy agenda has given progressives plenty to cheer, including the dozens of executive orders he has signed and the ambitious legislative agenda he has proposed, beginning with the passage of one of the largest economic stimulus packages in U.S. history.
Some progressives say the crises facing the country and the urgency of solving them have helped Biden, who was being evaluated against what Democrats saw as months of inaction by the previous administration.
“Democrats were demanding shots in the arms and true economic help from the government,” said Faiz Shakir, who is a political adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders and managed Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. “There was incredible unity in the Democratic Party of rising to the moment and acting quickly.”
Shakir pointed to the passing of a popular $1.9 trillion relief package shortly after Biden took office, a bill he muscled through without any Republican support — opting for Democratic unity over bipartisan compromise. The president’s embrace of stimulus payments as part of that legislation — a policy that put money in the pockets of 127 million Americans — within weeks of taking office certainly did not hurt his standing, Shakir said.
“It just had so many benefits for so many people,” he said.
That bill was especially well liked within Biden’s party: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted just before it passed found that it enjoyed support from 97% of Democrats. As a result, the president has been able to unify his party around major initiatives tied to liberal investments in the social safety net.
“The Democratic Party has shifted itself,” Murray said. “It has become more progressive, and you even have centrists who are on board with a few things that they wouldn’t have been happy with a few years ago.”
But Biden may also be benefiting from some forms of progress that were not entirely of his own making. Millions of Americans are being vaccinated daily, moving the country closer to emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. As the United States moves slowly but steadily toward herd immunity, forecasters anticipate a quickly expanding economy, with even Republicans like Sen. Mitch Mcconnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, predicting a financial boom that could last into 2023.
Biden took steps to hasten virus vaccine production, but some of his political success on that front can be attributed to savvy public positioning. By tamping down expectations for vaccine distribution during his first weeks in office, when Biden beat his own expectations, his team conjured an image of a White House working overtime to leave the efforts of the previous administration in the dust.
“Democrats utterly detested Donald Trump, and Joe Biden saved them from Donald Trump, and so they love him,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “If you look at the overall job approval, not just among Democrats, Biden’s job approval is the inverse of Donald Trump’s.”
Biden is hardly the first president to enjoy broad support from his party upon taking office. It is typical for commanders in chief to start their first term with a broadly positive approval rating, as Biden did, although that is always subject to the pull of gravity after the first few weeks are over.
But in the history of Gallup polling going back to the mid-20th century, Biden is the first president to have started his term with the approval of more than 90% of partisans.
To a degree, this reflects the fact that as the two major parties have grown more entrenched in their ideological identities, voters at the center have become slightly less likely to identify with either one. As a result, there has been a recent uptick in the share of Americans calling themselves political independents.
“The partisan tribalism is such that you really are, in many ways, a true believer if you’re still going to call yourself a Democrat or a Republican,” Murray said. “What you’re left behind with is people who are going to be more staunch in their partisanship.”
Just a few decades ago, a president with sky-high approval within his party would also be relatively popular outside it. But Biden’s approval rating, though positive overall, remains low among Republicans and stuck in the low to mid-50s among independents.
“If you go back a generation and somebody has a 95% approval rating within their own party, that probably means they have about 50% approval among voters in the other party,” Murray said. “We don’t have that. We have this partisan split. His overall job rating is just above 50%. It’s still positive, but we would expect in former days that that would translate to a 60% approval rating.”