President-elect Joe Biden is already more popular than President Donald Trump has ever been, according to CNN ‘s polling expert Harry Enten.
In a Sunday op-ed, Enten pointed to a number of recent polls and analyzed publicly available data pertaining to Trump’s popularity.
For instance, in the latest Gallup poll, 55 percent of respondents said that they view Biden favorably, while 41 percent said the same of Trump, whose unfavorable rating was 15 percentage points higher than the Democrat’s.
Since 2015, Trump’s favorable rating has been relatively stable, but low, staying in the 30s and 40s. In fact, the commander-in-chief never exceeded 50 percent popularity in any survey, according to Enten.
Biden, however, has done that many times and he is about as well-liked as former President Barack Obama was at the beginning of his second term in the White House, the expert noted.
Recent polls from Fox News , CNN and The New York Times all suggest that the Democrat enjoys a degree of popularity that Trump simply does not.
Data also suggests that Biden is generally better liked than his own party. As Enten noted, Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives, winning the nationwide vote by around 3 percentage points, while Biden won it by 4.5 points.
“This marked one of the rare times in history where the House majority party did worse than their side’s presidential candidate who was not an incumbent,” Enten wrote.
“Indeed, Biden is more popular than Trump has been at any point since he started running for president in June 2015.”
“The 2020 election was, like almost every election involving an incumbent, mostly about voters’ feelings toward said incumbent,” the expert noted.
“Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the fact that the challenger was a fairly popular guy. He did not allow Trump to make this election a choice of the lesser of two evils,” he concluded.
Per The Guardian , in the 2020 presidential contest, Biden received over 81 million votes, more than any candidate in U.S. history. Around 74 million Americans voted for his opponent. The Democrat won 306 electoral college votes, compared to Trump’s 232. He also managed to flip some traditionally red states, such as Georgia and Arizona.
According to the Pew Research Center , Trump’s approval rating has remained steady since his inauguration in January 2017.
Trump has not yet conceded the 2020 race to Biden, but at a Saturday rally in the state of Georgia he appeared to acknowledge defeat. Speaking to a crowd of supporters, he floated running again in 2024 and promised to help the Republican Party win full control of the U.S. Congress in the 2022 midterms.
