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Several media sources and Biden’s campaign have emphasized an immediate CNN survey conducted after his address, which showed that 65% of viewers thought well of his speech. Furthermore, viewers’ opinions of the nation’s orientation changed by 17 percentage points; following the speech, 62 percent of respondents thought the nation was moving in the right direction, compared to 45 percent previously, according to Blake.
These two statements are accurate. It is also true that the majority of people who watch State of the Union speeches tend to be their sympathizers, which contributes to the speeches’ nearly universally positive reception.
In fact, the speech’s favorable opinion share of 65 percent was lower than any other speech that CNN has polled on in the preceding 25 years, with Donald Trump’s 2018 speech scoring 70 percent.
The 35 percent who rated their experience as “very” good essentially equaled the 34 percent who rated it as the lowest on record from the previous year. George W. Bush’s 2007 address and Joe Biden’s 2022 speech came in close second and third, respectively, with 41% of viewers rating both speeches as “very” good.
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“The 17-point shift toward the country moving in the ‘right direction’ was also unremarkable, historically speaking. Dating back to Bill Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union address, viewers have shifted an average of 15 points toward that more optimistic view,” Blake wrote.
“Now we get to the caveat, and that’s that viewers Thursday were less aligned with the president than your average State of the Union audience — potentially because we’re in a campaign year or because questions about Biden’s ability to perform drew in more people who were skeptical of him,” he continued. “That appears to explain at least part of the poorer-than-normal reviews — but not all.”
Thirty percent of the CNN sample identified as Republican, and thirty percent as Democratic. He noted that in these surveys, the opposition party’s members are typically outnumbered by double digits by members of the president’s party.
Politicians had previously seen crowds that were similarly split but received better ratings. Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the CNN sample for Trump’s addresses in 2017 and 2018, but the difference was only five percentage points.
In spite of this, Blake noted that Trump’s reviews from those speeches were higher than Biden’s on Thursday, with 78 percent of them being good (including 57 percent that were “very” positive) in 2017 and 70 percent being positive (including 48 percent that were “very” positive) in 2018.
He stressed that it’s still early and that it’s critical to stay alert for new information that may surface in the days and weeks to come, in addition to direct assessments of the address.
Severe evaluations of the speech could not fully capture the underlying changes in people’s views, especially with regard to Biden’s wit. He underlined that these are the numbers that need our full attention.
