Former Vice President Joe Biden may currently be the one of the most well-liked major politicians in America, but his popularity is about to nosedive.
As he closes in on his increasingly likely decision to run for president, Biden is broadly popular. A Gallup poll taken last month found that 56 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him, compared with 32 percent who viewed him unfavorably. In contrast, President Trump has a favorable rating of 44 percent and Hillary Clinton is down at 36 percent.
But Biden’s relatively high approval rating largely reflects the fact that he isn’t currently an active candidate for president. Once he announces, he’ll go from being an elder statesman who nobody has much reason to attack, to a threat to a crowded Democratic field, as well as Trump. This will cause the public to alter the metric of evaluating him and result in an avalanche of negative attention.
I looked at Biden’s approval rating going back to Sept. 2008, right after he was named Barack Obama’s running mate. Before that, too few people knew who he was to make comparisons to his favorable rating as a widely known public figure. For much of his vice presidency, views of Biden were tied to the fortunes of Obama and Democrats. They went up as the Obama presidency was starting, went down during the weak economy, recovered a bit after reelection, and went down as Republicans took back the Senate in 2014 when it dipped into the 30s. Since then, Biden has undergone two spikes. The first came after the tragic death of his son Beau Biden, an event that Biden handled with grace and that earned him a lot of sympathy. The next bump came as he was leaving office. It has remained elevated as he’s assumed the elder statesman role and largely remained out of daily political controversies.
Once he announces he’s going to run for president, however, all of the knives will come out, and Democratic rivals will start pushing negative stories about him to the media. We’ll see a lot more stories like the one that appeared in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, headlined, “The burden of a 40-year career: Some of Joe Biden’s record doesn’t age well.”
There is some lesson for this in Hillary Clinton’s experience in the public spotlight.
Dating back to Clinton’s first run for president, after receiving a brief spike in popularity after announcing her run in January 2007, she saw her popularity dip, until being named former President Obama’s first Secretary of State. In the role of the nation’s top diplomat, she spent most of the time traveling and playing the role of a mature stateswoman who remained above the fray. The major political problems of Obama’s first term — the Great Recession, the healthcare fight, the debt ceiling standoff — didn’t involve her. This caused her favorable rating to spike and remain elevated for several years, that is, until she left office and her intentions of running in 2016 became clear. Though her favorable rating went as high as 66 percent during the Obama administration, by August 2015, in the midst of a tougher than expected challenge against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., it had tanked to 41 percent.
So, while Biden is currently the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination based on his name recognition and generally high favorable rating, that is likely to change quickly once he jumps into the ring and voters start to see him in a new light.
