President Joe Biden may have received a fundraising bump after this month’s State of the Union address… but he didn’t win over any new voters.
Despite his politicized speech, Biden has stagnated in approval polls, and he has yet to gain support in the rematch against former President Donald Trump.
Democrats loved the speech. Everyone else was unmoved.
In FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregate, Biden was sitting at 38.1 percent approval on March 7, the day of his speech. Since then, he hasn’t polled above 38.4 percent. On March 11, he was actually polling lower, at 38.0 percent.
The individual polls don’t look any better.
In the days following the speech, pollsters at YouGov and Yahoo News interviewed 1,482 American adults online. They found Biden’s approval rating at 39 percent.
By contrast, the same poll surveyed more than 1,500 people in late January, and back then, it found Biden at 40 percent approval.
Granted, election polls tend to diverge from approval polls… but the election polls look bleak for the president, too.
The YouGov poll found Biden tied with Trump in January’s poll of the general election… and it found Biden tied with Trump again even after the State of the Union.
In other words, Biden was polling within the survey’s 2.8 percent margin of error. He lost 44-to-45 in January and 44-to-46 in March.
Previously, Biden had seen polling bumps after his State of the Union addresses. According to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate of his approval ratings, he saw an especially pronounced bump in 2022, mere weeks into the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.
So, voters have made up their minds about Biden, and they remained unmoved by his “fiery” speech.
Biden left the voters cold, but he seems to have stirred another cohort: the donors.
After the speech, Biden’s re-election campaign saw its most lucrative 24-hour period ever. The campaign, along with committees like ActBlue, raised $10 million in one day, according to NBC News. By comparison, this collection of groups raised only about $40 million during the entire month of January.
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The Horn editorial team