Hey, Remember That Biden Polling Bounce in March That Supposedly Heralded His Big Comeback?

If you look at the aggregate of polls regarding President Biden’s approval rating, it tells a simple story. Biden started out fairly popular and had okay numbers until the middle of summer 2021. His job approval really slid in August 2o21 during the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and it has remained low ever since. For almost all of this year, on the FiveThirtyEight aggregate, Biden’s average approval rating has remained between 4o percent and 43 percent; his disapproval has remained between 51.6 percent and 53 percent.

Every now and then, some pollster will find a slightly better number for Biden, and it’s not hard to find media voices heralding those polls as a turning point, and that the Biden comeback is starting. Back in early March:

Biden’s favorability among registered voters has risen slightly to 45 percent, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted March 4-7. Although the president remains underwater, with 51 percent disapproving of his job performance, the survey marks a 4 percentage point increase since last week.

By late April, Biden’s approval rating was back down to 42 percent in the Politico/Morning Consult poll.

And Quinnipiac, around the same time, said:

In today’s poll, registered voters give Biden a negative 40–51 percent job approval rating with 9 percent not offering an opinion. This compares to a negative 38–52 percent job approval rating a week ago.

Biden’s job approval rating has been steadily inching higher since he hit a low in a January 12, 2022 Quinnipiac University poll when Americans gave him a negative 33–53 percent job approval rating and registered voters gave him a negative 35–54 percent job approval rating.

By April, Biden was still at 40 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval — perhaps an improvement from his lowest point, but hardly a serious comeback.

And finally, perhaps the poll that stirred the most false hope, back in March:

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey finds he is seeing a significant boost in his approval ratings across the board following his State of the Union address and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. . . Overall approval rating jumped to 47 percent, up 8 points from the NPR poll last month.

Stuart Rothenberg declared that, “There is a chance that the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey may have found something more significant, not just a short-lived spike in Biden’s approval.”

Never mind. By late April, Biden was back to 42 percent approval, 53 percent disapproval in the Marist survey.

If you want to solve a problem, the first thing you have to do is see it clearly and completely and shake loose any lingering instinct to deny the existence of the problem. If you’re a Republican, you probably feel pretty good watching Democrats latch on to any slight polling movement — most of which is within the margin of error, and only a few percentage points better than other recent polls — convincing themselves that they’ve endured the worst of the storm and that everything is looking up.

Give CNN a little credit for telling its audience something it may not want to hear this morning: “The political environment is terrible for Democrats — and it may get worse.”