President Joe Biden’s first term passed the three-month point last week and will hit the 100th-day mark this week. We’re now at the point where the Biden presidency is well underway, and the American public has a track record to judge him by.
The verdict so far has been historically consistent. Biden sports the steadiest approval rating on record for a president through nearly 100 days in office. Looking at the average poll, his approval rating sits at right around 54%. You see this in data released on Sunday from ABC News/Washington Post (52% approve), CBS News/YouGov (58% approve), Fox News (54% approve) and NBC News (53% approve). Biden’s approval rating at this point is not historically strong, by any means. Most other presidents in the post-World War II era had approval ratings above him at this point. The only clear exceptions were Gerald Ford, after he pardoned Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, whose approval rating never got above 50%. What makes Biden unique is that his approval rating at the beginning of his presidency was a very similar 53%. In fact, if you were to average the polls on any given day, you’ll see that Biden’s approval rating has never gone higher than 55% or even reached as low as 52% during the more than three months he’s been in office. It’s averaged a little less than 54%. The range of results has traded within a band of less than 3 points. To put it mildly, this is an extremely narrow range. The median difference between the highest average approval rating a president had and lowest during their first 100 days in office has been 9.5 points. The president with the narrowest range before Biden, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had a range of 4 points between their lowest and highest average approval rating.
