Joe Biden: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

Here'a how things were for President Trump four years ago:


One pollster, all fifty states and DC. September 2017. A bit more flattering for Trump than what I already have. There will be updates.

Polling data based upon Morning Consult, Note that this data is more flattering, on the whole, to President Trump than what I already had. This pollster is not giving state-by-state analysis this year.

(Electoral votes are for 2020).






Trump disapproval, net negative and

55% or higher (dark red)
50-54% (medium red)
44-49% (pink)

Ties are in white.

If net positive for Trump)

44-49% (pale blue)
50-55% (medium blue)
56% or higher (dark blue)

But raw disapproval numbers appear instead  of electoral votes here:




Disapproval (net negative for Trump) : Similar color scheme.

55% or higher
50-54%
44-49%

Ties are in white.

(net positive for Trump)
46-49%  
41-45%
40% or lower

.............................................

....of course there were shifts from then, but in general where Trump was behind he lost., Exceptions were Iowa, Ohio, and North Carolina. Trump did something politically astute after he saw disdain for him (he was already offending multitudes with hostile bluster, and his promotion of tariffs would hurt certain parts of rural America -- but he opened the spigots on farm subsidies to offset the losses from tariffs, in which case taxpayers ended up buying votes for Trump). Trump still lost.

President Biden is more unlucky because

(1) the Afghanistan withdrawal was Trump's deal and it blew up for the next President,
(2) COVID-19 is still deadly, and it is still deadly because of so many people who failed to do what was right (like getting the vaccine!)
(3) The American economy still reels from COVID-19 disrupting supply chains, which has brought about inflation.

We are in a 4T, and within the last five years at the most. COVID-19 has killed at a level characteristic of a Crisis-era war. In the last Crisis War people people died in war because they were shot, they stepped on mines, their ships were sunk, their aircraft were shot down, or their captors mistreated them. This time you want the shot if you are at all rational. People are dying while hooked up to ventilators in heroic efforts to keep people whose bodies COVID-19 has taken over can't keep up with the damage that the virus has done. People are being crippled, too, and people will get conditions that will shorten their lives.

The neoliberal era in economics that depended upon keeping prices low for retirees by sweating people who did the work and denying them opportunities to escape sweatshop conditions except through extraordinary effort, seems over. Prices were low and steady because real wages fell. Profits soared, especially in the property-rental business. Prices obviously rise when people start to get paid better.

700,000 lives lost? That is in between Washington DC (689,545  - 2020 Census) and Denver (715,522 2020 Census), 20th- and 19th-largest cities in the USA. We had a great national hissy-fit about the deaths from 9/11 about 3000 inexcusable deaths, and rightly so. That's about twenty times the nationwide deaths in an average year (it is actually in decline despite more miles driven), and we spend huge amounts of money to make highways and vehicles safer and dedicate much of the activity of state troopers to enforcing speed and DUI law, and set up red-light traps. The death toll from COVID-19 is more than 200 times that, and we have had days of death as horrible as. 9/11 or the Pearl Harbor attack. In war we cashier generals and admirals who have unexpected and inexcusable death tolls in combat. We whacked Osama bin Laden because he was never going to turn himself in.

We are going through some difficult and confusing times. Few were confused about loving or despising Donald Trump; there was little middle ground. There was little "I love his policies and hate his methods or character" or "He's a lousy President but I li9ke him any way" stuff. I can't fully compare Biden to Trump because we have seen him recently at his best in polling and still see him near his worst, and those are very different. Views of Trump were remarkably consistent in the electorate, and they are not so with President Biden.