And that includes 43 percent of Republicans. Times are good, better than they’ve ever been, and the country has Joe Biden to thank for it.
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A whopping 72 percent of viewers approved of President Joe Biden‘s State of the Union speech — including 43 percent of Republicans who watched.
Biden delivered his first State of the Union address under the new GOP House majority Tuesday night, and a raucous majority it turned out to be.
One facet of the speech has emerged as the dominant theme of the coverage. At one point during the speech, Biden invoked plans from several Republicans that would cause programs like Social Security to sunset every few years and disappear for good if not reauthorized. The president found himself flat-out arguing with Republicans screaming “LIAR!” in the middle of the speech.
That scene was repeated several times, with Biden shooting back by telling his rowdy colleagues to “look it up!”
According to a CNN poll taken before and after the speech, Biden’s performance went over very well. The key findings, according to CNN:
- A 72% majority of Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a smaller 34% reacting very positively.
- That pattern of broad but tempered enthusiasm is similar to the reception for Biden’s speech last year. In 2022, 71% of speech-watchers reacted positively to his address, with 41% saying their reaction was very positive.
- Presidential addresses tend to attract generally friendly audiences. The pool of people who watched Biden speak was about 8 percentage points more Democratic than the general public, marking a less heavily partisan audience than Biden faced in the past two years, or that Trump saw for several addresses during his presidency.
The results, as CNN noted, are generally in line with past SOTU polls, but Biden’s audience was less heavily partisan than others of the recent past.
Another key piece of good news for Biden: the percentage of viewers who said “policies Biden has proposed will move the country in the right direction” jumped 19 points from before the speech to after the speech (from 52% to 71%) — and it jumped a whopping 26 points among independents (from 40% to 66%).
