President Biden’s approval ratings are not good. According to FiveThirtyEight’s averages of recent polls, Biden is less popular at this point in his presidency than any modern president, save one: Donald Trump. Trump, of course, left office having never seen an approval rating north of 50 percent in most polls.
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Not all of that was Trump’s fault. He was the second president to serve in an era in which presidential approval ratings are bound by sharp partisan polarization. The first was Barack Obama, who, after a brief honeymoon period in 2009, quickly saw his approval ratings defined primarily by how much he was loved by Democrats and hated by Republicans. When Trump was elected, that relationship flipped, but the effect was the same. And now, Biden, who through October saw the second-biggest partisan approval gap — an 84-point difference between the parties — in Gallup’s history.
The record is 85 points, held by Trump in 2020.
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On Monday afternoon, the Economist’s G. Elliott Morris observed that this massive partisan divide was probably here to stay. Biden campaigned on the prospect of not being as polarizing as Trump, but we have learned that such things are increasingly out of the control of presidents. Nothing Trump did was going to appeal to Democrats, not that he tried very much. Nothing Biden is likely to do is going to appeal much to Republicans.
This is a cynical view of things, certainly, and I might be wrong. Perhaps there will be a president soon who manages to appeal to his party’s opposition. It’s just hard to imagine that happening, both because of the massive infrastructure that exists to foment partisan opposition and because of broader trends in partisan politics.
The American National Election Studies (ANES) conducted in each presidential election year allows us to see how views of the parties themselves have changed over time. The survey asks respondents to evaluate how they feel about each party on a scale from zero (cold) to 100 (warm). On average, Democrats feel more warmly about the Democratic Party than Republicans and vice versa. But the data also shows that views of the parties by opponents began to collapse in the mid-1990s.
Notice that each party’s view of their own party has remained fairly constant (despite a plunge among Republicans in 2016). Among the opposition, though, that drop.
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This is interesting to note because it’s correlated to the gap in presidential approval, even if it’s not necessarily causally linked. After a drop in the partisan difference in presidential approval enjoyed by George H.W. Bush at the time of the Gulf War, both the gap in views of the parties and the gap in presidential approval began to expand quickly.
What that graph does not show is a slowing of any of the three partisan gaps. The gap in views of the president are not narrowing, nor are the gaps by party.
It’s a bit like global warming: Even if the gap stops growing, we’re still in a bad spot. The question of whether these gaps narrow is a central one in American politics at the moment, whether there’s a way to unwind partisan tension. To Morris’s point, it doesn’t look as though it’s happening anytime soon.