The April CNN poll showing 55 percent of Americans saying that Donald Trump’s presidency was a success, with 44 percent remembering it to be a failure, stands in stark contrast with the public assessment of his performance while he was still in office.
In January 2021, in his last weeks in office, just 41 percent told CNN pollsters that Trump’s presidency was a success, and 55 percent deemed it a failure. Keep in mind that Trump was the only Oval Office occupant in the 70 years of modern political polling never to reach a 50 percent approval level in the Gallup survey. Fully two-thirds of Americans disapproved of his performance as president in the final Gallup poll of his tenure. His final job-approval rating of 34 percent was the lowest of any president leaving office in Gallup’s history, hardly a rousing send-off or affirmation of his four years in office.
What are we to make of these divergent views about Trump’s presidency? What explains this political resurrection in the public’s assessment of his performance? Is the old proverb correct that “absence makes the heart grow fonder"?
Maybe it is something else. Remember the old joke about the woman who was asked by a friend, “How’s your husband?” to which she responded, “Compared to what?” It would seem that only when compared with Biden did Americans begin to revisit their attitudes toward Trump’s presidency.
That same CNN poll in April showed 39 percent considered Biden’s presidency a success, 16 points lower than the 55 percent assessing Trump's presidency successful. Sixty-one percent judged Biden’s presidency a failure, a 17-point-higher rejection rate than Trump’s. Last month, Biden’s approval rating in the Gallup poll was 39 percent (56 percent disapproved). Starting in September 2021, Biden’s approval ratings in Gallup polling have ranged between 37 and 44 percent, with his disapprovals between 51 and 59 percent. (As you may recall, Biden’s approval ratings during his first half year in office weren’t bad: Gallup had his approval between 54 and 57 percent, compared to a disapproval between 37 and 42 percent each month.)
In the old days, newly minted presidents got honeymoons, when most Americans would give their new leader the benefit of the doubt for some period of time until that president would begin to disappoint or alienate them about something. The partisan tribalization of American politics has meant that new White House occupants get no honeymoons; they are lucky to get a long weekend before the disapprovals start soaring. Nowadays, most of the 45 percent or so who identify or lean towards the opposition party can now be counted on to immediately disapprove, perhaps even before the inauguration ceremony and parade have concluded, making Biden’s early approval ratings about as good as a president can hope for.
In his first six months in office, even the increasingly porous U.S.-Mexican border had not begun to negatively impact Biden’s approval numbers. In Biden’s earliest months in office, there had been only a slight increase in the inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, most likely due to growing supply-chain issues.
But for the month of March, it jumped up another 1.4 points to 4.0 percent, which may or may not have been related to the first checks and direct deposits from the American Rescue Plan Act reaching Americans in the third week of that month. By December 2021, inflation would hit 6.5 percent, en route to a Biden-era peak of 8.7 percent in June 2022. The less-than-decorous departure from Afghanistan and the horrible scenes at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul certainly didn’t help things.
All told, Biden’s Gallup approval rating—56 percent in June of 2021—dropped to 42 percent for the month of October, a 14-point collapse in four months. That recalibration of public assessment of Biden’s performance probably was about the time that minds began to change on how Trump had done.
Whenever I hear partisans complain about their side having a message problem, more often than not it is actually a substance problem. The revised view that a critical segment of voters have of Trump’s presidency may be less about Trump and more about the juxtaposition with Biden.
This race has been the most stable, least volatile presidential race in the 52 years that I have watched these contests. As this column noted last week, it is a “mature” race with extreme partisanship anchoring much of the vote. Both parties’ nominees-in-waiting have total name recognition and definition in the minds of voters, a long-held view that Trump was no Boy Scout and that Biden embarked on a more aggressive policy agenda than the mandate given to him by a narrow Electoral College win, a 50-50 Senate split, and a half-dozen-seat margin in the House. Both 2017 and 2021 proved the point that nowadays, no win is too small to declare a landslide. Voters might take a different view.
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