What Went Down During President Biden’s Speech To Congress

Biden just used the phrase “logistical achievement,” which I’ve never heard before in a presidential address.

The federal government under President Biden prioritized vaccine distribution, and it seems to be paying off. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll from earlier this week, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have either already received their inoculation or plan to do so.

Naturally, Biden starts by highlighting how far we’ve come in the face of this devastating pandemic. And those efforts are well-received. As our tracker shows, Americans’ approval of Biden’s response to the coronavirus has remained steady and strong over these first 100 days.

Biden touting 220 million COVID-19 shots after promising just 100 million is a textbook example of underpromising and over-delivering.

It makes sense Biden would tout the American Rescue Plan, since the bill drew bipartisan support. I know most people watching tonight’s speech are probably Biden fans to begin with, but I also wonder if re-upping the bill’s success is the president’s way to appeal to middle- and lower-income Republicans. According to a previous Pew survey, a majority (63 percent) of lower-income Republicans said they were in favor of it.

Usually around 1,600 people attend joint addresses like tonight’s, but because of COVID-19 protocols, only around 200 are in the audience. For instance, Chief Justice John Roberts is the only representative from the Supreme Court.

Biden says, “Madame Vice President, no president has ever said those words from this podium, and it’s about time.”

There is also some history being made tonight with two women behind the podium for the first time. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who has stood there before) and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the first Black and South Asian American vice president and the first woman and first woman of color to serve in that role.

Biden is going to paint a picture of the country finally returning to some sense of normalcy, but this scene of the House is not normal for a presidential address. The chamber is very sparse, everyone is wearing masks, and there are none of the eager handshakes that usually define this kind of event.

Agreed, Hakeem. Too much of a pat on the back won’t be very palatable. A lot of Americans are still struggling on a lot of fronts.

I’m eager to see Biden walk quite a tightrope tonight. He will rightly make the point that Americans overwhelmingly support the policies he has proposed. That’s a check in the “unity” box. But the country remains quite divided, and the legacies of race and racism have been in clear view in recent weeks with the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, and other instances of police violence. I will be interested to hear how he addresses the latter.

We already know that Biden will call on Congress tonight to enact big items on his agenda — for instance, his immigration bill, which includes a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, and gun-control measures such as a ban on assault weapons. These policy requests are a core feature of State of the Union addresses, or in the case of new presidents, addresses to a joint session of Congress. Political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard track the number of policy requests that presidents make in these addresses and found an average of 33 policy proposals per speech from 1965 to 2019.

The thing is, though, that Congress often doesn’t bother to act on them. Only 39 percent of the policy proposals from presidents’ 1965-2019 addresses were fully or partially enacted within the following year. So speeches like this one receive a lot of fanfare, but they don’t drive policy all that much.

Tonight, Biden will try to drum up support for his political agenda in front of Congress. But there’s a lot Biden can do without the cooperation of Congress, including dismantling aspects of his predecessors’ agenda.

And in his first 100 days, Biden has been busy taking a bite out of Trump’s legacy, already revoking 39 of Trump’s executive orders. That puts Biden far ahead of recent presidents.

In addition to using executive orders to undo Trump’s legacy, Biden has also signed a bevy of executive orders to advance his own agenda. So, although tonight’s speech will be about helping the American people work together via the executive and congressional branches, Biden and his administration have already demonstrated that they are ready — and willing — to use the powers of the executive branch to unilaterally advance their agenda.

Public opinion toward Biden during his first 100 days can tell us a lot about how polarized our politics are right now. With an approval rating in the low 50s, Biden hasn’t enjoyed a “honeymoon” period like many past presidents, and that’s at least partly due to the overwhelming Republican opposition he’s faced from Day One.

In the past, presidents could count on a small but substantial chunk of early approval from the other party, which could help that president achieve greater overall support. However, that’s practically nonexistent now, as Biden’s current approval rating features the largest gap between Democratic and Republican support of any recent president over his first 100 days, according to Gallup’s presidential approval polling.

This divide is also similar to what we saw in Trump’s first 100 days, so this appears to be the new normal, one that requires us to adjust how we interpret presidential approval polling. Such hardened partisan opinions means we’re less likely to see sizable swings in how Americans view a president — even after major events. Tellingly, Trump had the steadiest, least-varied approval rating of any president since the advent of public opinion polling, and we may see something similar with Biden.

One of Biden’s goals with tonight’s speech is to sell his policies to the American public and, perhaps more to the point, to Congress. But how likely is that to work?

Political scientists have long been skeptical of presidential rhetoric. At the same time, research suggests that how the media and politicians talk about a policy — typically referred to by media scholars as “framing” — can make a difference in public support for it. Framing effects have been linked to changing public attitudes and eventual policy changes on issues like the death penalty and the estate tax.

That said, it’s not very likely that Biden will come up with the magic words to build coalitions for passing his agenda. And the speech probably won’t change people’s minds if they’ve already formed an opinion on an issue or a piece of legislation. But how Biden presents his top priorities, like infrastructure or climate change, could affect how his message resonates with people’s existing values or help them make sense of why these items take priority. Sometimes, memorable phrases can catch on in the media, broadening their reach beyond just the people who watched the speech on TV.

So Biden’s words might especially help voters in his own party make sense of the issues, given that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be watching. However, with nearly every issue mapping onto partisan divides and little room for compromise on the big agenda items, that may not be enough to make policy changes.

If and when you see “insta-polls” in reaction to tonight’s speech, bear in mind that the audience for State of the Union addresses (or addresses to a joint session of Congress) skews toward fans of the president.

As the chart below shows, a plurality of the audience during the Clinton and Obama administrations were Democrats, while a plurality during the administrations of the younger Bush and Trump were Republicans.

Although it varies from person to person and speech to speech, presidents frequently use religious language in their public addresses. According to Ceri Hughes, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Trump was more likely to mention God in his presidential addresses than any president since at least Franklin Roosevelt.

Presidents employ religious language for a variety of reasons, including as persuasion to support political decisions, like the invasion of Iraq. Another reason that religious language has been a staple of presidential rhetoric is that presidents have historically addressed audiences that are receptive to such language.

But the potency of using religious language as a strategy might be waning, especially as the country (and increasingly Democrats) grow less religious. As FiveThirtyEight reported last week, a majority of Americans said they were not members of a church, mosque, or synagogue for the first time since Gallup started asking Americans about their religious membership in the 1930s.

Still, it’s unlikely that tonight’s speech will be completely devoid of religious language. First, Biden is a deeply religious person, so it will be a point of personal preference for him to make such references. Second, while a majority of Americans aren’t members of religious communities, it’s not that those people are necessarily hostile to religion — they are often just agnostic or unaffiliated — so religious references probably aren’t a deal breaker. Third, Biden campaigned on a message of bipartisanship, and although it’s been widely debated (here at FiveThirtyEight, too!) whether it’s politically wise to keep working toward that goal, Biden could invoke religious language to appeal to religiously conservative Americans who didn’t vote for him or are still lukewarm in their support.

On the eve of his 100th day in office, President Biden will deliver his first speech to a joint session of Congress. It’s not technically a State of the Union address, but for all intents and purposes, it is. And it’s an important one. Biden hasn’t taken many opportunities to address the public.

That is, in part, because Biden has been busy dealing with one of the worst crises to ever face the United States: the coronavirus pandemic. (His administration is also a bit guarded when it comes to media attention.)

But tonight, as Biden pitches the second half of his sweeping plan to revitalize America’s economy — a $1.8 trillion plan to invest in education, child care and paid family leave — we’ll have an opportunity to hear him reflect on his accomplishments so far and what he perceives as the challenges ahead. We’ll also hear the GOP rebuttal of Biden’s vision from Sen. Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican senator.

Much of Biden’s strategy has centered on doing popular things, but he hasn’t had much luck bringing Republicans along, which, as we’ll discuss on this live blog, may not be a problem. After all, do Americans these days really even want bipartisanship?

As always, thanks for following along, and if you have any questions, ping us @538politics and I’ll try to get your question answered on the live blog.