How desperate are the Democrats to create the narrative that Joe Biden really knocked it out of the park on Thursday night? Pretty darn desperate. In an election where Joe Biden's age and cognitive health have become key issues, Biden's speech was no ordinary speech; it was a moment to prove he was up to the task of being president by proving he could read off a teleprompter for a short while without embarrassing himself too much.
That's not exactly how it played out. He yelled and slurred his way through the speech, but the narrative that the liberal media agreed upon — that it was a "fiery" speech — has been pushed endlessly by virtually every liberal media outlet.
And now they're trying to say that it worked.
The Biden campaign pounced on a CNN flash poll that showed 65% of speech viewers reacted positively to the speech, as well as a 17-point spike in those who believe the country is headed in the right direction.
As the Washington Post notes, these are both technically true, but extremely misleading.
"What’s also true is that State of the Union speeches almost always receive strongly favorable views, in part because viewership tends to draw disproportionately from their allies," explains senior political reporter Aaron Blake. "The 65 percent who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century — the previous low being Donald Trump’s 2018 address (70 percent)."
Related: Was Biden Drugged for the State of the Union? One Expert Thinks So.
As for the 35% who provided a "very" positive review of the speech? Well, that was virtually unchanged from Biden's speech last year, which was 34%, the lowest on record. "The next lowest were Biden’s 2022 speech and George W. Bush’s 2007 speech, which each earned “very” positive marks from 41 percent of viewers."
The numbers look worse as we dig deeper. Biden’s 17-point shift toward the country moving in the right was’ as Blake put it, “unremarkable” and within historical norms.
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.
That appears to explain at least part of the poorer-than-normal reviews — but not all.
The CNN sample was 36 percent Democratic and 30 percent Republican. Generally speaking, members of a president’s party will outnumber members of the opposite party by double digits.
But we have seen such closely divided audiences and with stronger reviews. In Trump’s 2017 and 2018 speeches, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by just five percentage points in CNN’s sample. Trump’s reviews in those speeches were still stronger than Biden’s on Thursday: 78 percent positive (including 57 percent “very” positive) in 2017, and 70 percent positive reviews (including 48 percent “very” positive) in 2018.
Even CNN would concede that reactions to Biden's speech fell largely along partisan lines.
But, even CNN's flash poll had some warning signs for Biden. According to CNN, "following the speech, 31% of those who watched said they have a lot of confidence in Biden’s ability to carry out his duties as president, 28% that they have some confidence, and 41% that they have no real confidence." Not are those numbers not great, they aren't a substantial improvement from before the speech. CNN noted it was just a "slight uptick from a survey conducted in the days before the speech, when 25% of those same people expressed a lot of confidence in his ability, 27% some confidence, and 48% none at all."
If there was anything the State of the Union hoped to achieve, it was to boost confidence in Biden's ability to carry out his duties. The speech made barely a blip in those numbers... and after recent events, it's clear it will be a short-lived blip.
