With America supporting Ukraine and punishing Russia for its invasion, is Joe Biden due his own approval-rating boost?
IN 1958 PAUL NEWMAN and Joan Collins starred in “Rally Round The Flag, Boys!”, a cold-war comedy about a small American town that gets chosen as the site of a new military base to house guided missiles. Twelve years later, John Mueller, a political scientist, adopted the same phrase in an academic-journal article analysing what factors caused presidents’ approval ratings to rise and fall.
With America now supporting Ukraine and punishing Russia for its invasion, is Joe Biden due for his own rally? If so, how large a bounce should be expected—and is he on track to get it?compiled a dataset of every presidential-approval poll conducted since 1943. We used it to calculate a rolling average of approval polls for each leader. Our model uses statistical techniques from machine-learning to control for factors which could affect the polling average.
The resulting dataset quantifies each president’s approval rating on each day they served in office. We used it to measure the size of “rally-round-the-flag” effects after they became embroiled in foreign conflicts or faced significant threats to Americans at home. For example, in the month after George H.W. Bush announced the Gulf war against Iraq in 1991, his rating soared by more than 20 percentage points, according to our average .
But political polarisation may yet dampen any real jump in Mr Biden’s ratings. As the share of Americans who identify with one party over the other has increased, impacts on approval ratings from foreign crises, and even domestic politics, have decreased in magnitude. After the military raid that killed Osama bin Laden, for example, Barack Obama’s popularity rose by only 6-7 points, compared to the 20- and 30-point boosts for other leaders and events.
Mr Biden would welcome any improvement he can get. His approval rating today is 43%. That is an increase of roughly two points since February 23rd, the day before Mr Putin launched his war. That could be early evidence of a bounce—but it is not yet fully outside the range of random variations in polls. Only one poll, from Marist College, conducted for NPR and PBS NewsHour, has shown a sizeable bounce for the president.
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