Biden needs to win over public opinion, not pundit opinion

The State of the Union got a good reaction on Twitter, and a mediocre one in the polls

A confession: I don’t remember the last time I watched a State of the Union address.

Now, that’s not to say I haven’t seen my share of SOTUs. The Internet remembers everything, so apparently I watched President Trump’s speech in 2019, presumably along with others since we sometimes liveblogged them when I was at FiveThirtyEight.

But I don’t remember them because they rarely make news, the last major exception really being George W. Bush’s 2003 speech that laid out an extremely dubious justification for the Iraq War. They also rarely make any lasting difference to public opinion.

Free of the reins of Disney/ABC/FiveThirtyEight, I was planning to avoid this year’s speech. I don’t like the pomp-and-circumstance of the State of the Union, or participating in the political hivemind where partisan and nonpartisan opinion inevitably get merged together. But I found myself with a little extra time this morning as something else I was planning to work on got pushed back, so I watched the replay of President Biden’s speech. And since this is the week I apparently can’t stop blogging, I’m going to go ahead and write a little bonus post on it for paid subscribers.

Short version: I thought it was a strategically smart speech, unevenly delivered. It boosted morale among Democratic partisans I follow on Twitter, which I don’t think is worth very much, although a poor speech might have renewed calls for Biden to step aside and Biden cleared that hurdle. But the only polling results I’ve seen so far are mediocre for Biden — in fact, the worst of any recent SOTU in CNN’s polling — and that matters more. Fundamentally I do not buy that Biden’s main problem is an unfair narrative from the center-left media. Here’s more detail on all of that for paying subscribers.