Biden's State of the Union gave Democrats hope but not much else

When President Joe Biden entered the United States Capitol building last week, he did so not only to fulfill a constitutional obligation to inform Congress on the state of the union, but with a keen understanding that his address was, in a way, one of the major campaign opportunities of his reelection bid. Here, in a major televised event, was a platform to speak expansively about his vision for the country, his hopes for the future, and his criticism of Republicans — including his conspicuously unnamed "predecessor," whom he will face once more in November. It was also an opportunity to assuage longstanding fears and criticism of his age and mental acuity, which has emerged as a major campaign concern in his race against former President Donald Trump. 

By the night's end, Biden's speech seemed to have accomplished many of those goals, prompting even arch-conservative pundit John Podhoretz to allow that if he'd been a Democrat "in a panic for three weeks" over Biden's campaign, he would be "feeling a lot better" after the president's performance that evening. But pacifying concerns on the left (and aggravating the right) is one thing, actually making an electoral difference is something else entirely. This State of the Union address may have reintroduced the public to a feistier, more animated Joe Biden than they'd seen lately, but did it succeed in moving the needle on behalf of his presidential campaign? 

'A wave of retractions from his doubters'

Among Democrats, it's "hard to exaggerate the psychological boost" they experienced after Biden's speech, New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore said. In his speech, Biden "chipped away at public skepticism about his record and identified Republicans with deeply unpopular policy positions" to the point where Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's much-mocked Republican response was simply "dessert" to Biden's "satisfying main course" of an address. Biden and his team are now "riding a wave of retractions from his doubters" agreed The Dispatch. Longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a frequent critic of Biden's age, ceded that while "no one speech changes the entire trajectory of a campaign" the president "did what he had to last night, capturing the moment" and forcing Republicans to confront the "reality that this is going to be a long, hard slog."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In a post-speech CNN instant poll, a decisive majority — 65% of respondents — gave the address high marks. What's more, and perhaps more important to Biden's campaign, respondents shifted nearly 20 points in favor of the sentiment that the country was headed in the right direction, from 45% before the president took the podium, to 62% once he was finished.

The Biden campaign is wasting little time capitalizing on that sentiment, with a battleground state tour that will "build momentum for his reelection campaign after a fiery State of the Union address last week," The Associated Press said. 

'A master class in how not to win an argument'

For as much as Biden may have "calmed — for the moment — Democratic bed-wetters," it is "far from clear" whether he changed the "fundamental concerns" that have dogged his campaign to date, former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove said in a Wall Street Journal editorial this week. Accentuating that point, The Washington Post said, the "65 percent" of CNN respondents who had a "positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century." Ultimately, concurred Kilgore, there's "simply not much evidence that it changed many minds about Joe Biden's job performance or flipped many votes from Republican to Democrat."

To the extent that there is polling data, it largely shows Biden's speech had minimal impact on the electorate overall. A Yahoo/YouGov survey taken in the days after the State of the Union saw "zero improvement in perceptions of the president — or in his standing against former President Donald Trump." If anything, Biden's address was a "master class in how not to win an argument" Republican adviser and CBS News analyst David Winston said in Roll Call. No matter his "theatrics," Winston continued, Biden simply tried to "sell the same statements that a majority of voters don’t believe."