What Went Down In Trump’s 2019 State Of The Union

So far, this speech is full of pablum that no one will remember 24 hours from now. Trump’s speeches are usually interesting. This sounds like a speech George W. Bush could give. Maybe this is good for Trump and he should do this all the time.

On the celebrating anniversaries front, no sign of celebrating the 100th anniversary of Congress passing the 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage, though it wasn’t ratified until 1920.

Trump has taken two shots at “resistance” thus far. So even though we’ve gotten lots of bipartisan themes — he’s sending signals.

On that bipartisan applause line — a call for compromise — lots of Democrats stood and clapped, but my feed just showed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sitting stony-faced.

Here is Buzz Aldrin punching a purveyor of fake news in the face.

I’ve actually felt this week like Trump is very relatable to me, personally, given that he’ll go on national television with his tie off-center and also that hates to schedule meetings before 11 a.m. in the morning.

It’s basically the last U.S. institution that Americans trust, Clare, as you’ve written.

Well, this is a very Trumpian intro, in some ways, Nate — he loves the military, and it’s interesting to me that that’s the way that he’s framing his unity thing. Behind the historical power of the U.S. military.

With that said, he’s leaning into Howard Schultz-y, Morning Joe-y bipartisanship pretty hard here so far.

Maybe I missed it, but did the speaker introduce the president? He has no speaking rights in this chamber unless it is granted to him by a member.

Small thing, but Trump just said that “it’s not a Republican agenda … and not a Democrat agenda.” The usual adjective there would be “Democratic” rather than “Democrat,” whereas “Democrat” is a term used by a lot of right-wing talk show hosts because it sorts of annoys Democrats.

“Not as two parties, but as one nation,” sounds like the theme for tonight.

There’s lots of white in the crowd tonight. Ahead of the address tonight, Democratic congresswomen wearing white shared group pictures on social media. By dressing in white, they are giving a nod to the women’s suffrage movement and signaling their commitment to “fighting for equality,” as U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico put it:

But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Other women have worn white for its symbolism of equality — Hillary Clinton did so when she accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, as did Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, when she accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination. In 1969, Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, wore white when she was sworn in.

All that said, the suffragette movement does have an uncomfortable history. As The New York Times’ Brent Staples wrote on Saturday, many prominent white leaders of the suffrage movement ignored black suffragists who wanted to address racial inequality as well. However, suffragettes did help pass the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, even though black women in the South remained largely disenfranchised in the era of Jim Crow.

Sign that he needs a tie clip.

Trump’s tie is leaning to his left. Is this the sign of a #pivot?

Even though Trump has hinted that he might say something controversial tonight, what distinguishes the State of the Union address from other speeches that he gives is the level of polish on display. Trump almost unerringly reads from his prepared remarks during his addresses to Congress, which isn’t typical of his other speaking opportunities. It was his 2017 address to Congress that prompted CNN commentator Van Jones to say that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment.” And to some extent, that makes sense considering what we know about how Trump feels about the address. According to a New York Times article on Monday:

Mr. Trump, aides said, views the speech and all of the pomp and circumstance that accompany it with some reverence, and aides said he puts more time into his script because it is one instance where he usually sticks to it.

In short, the State of the Union is when Trump most acts and sounds like previous presidents.

That said, Trump will be speaking tonight to a less receptive audience in Congress, and that could throw him. Democrats now control the House, and several of the recently elected freshmen were just sent there by constituents who want Trump out of office. Also, Trump will be standing in front of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with whom he just fought during the government shutdown negotiations. Granted, there will be plenty of opportunities for Trump to offer olive branches (symbolic, if not substantive) to Pelosi in the way that President George W. Bush did at the opening of his 2007 State of the Union address. And although it’s generally not Trump’s style to do this, he has praised Pelosi in the past. And even if he doesn’t do that tonight, chances are that he’ll stick to the script he’s given.

Our friends at ABC News conducted a poll that found that Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president since at least Eisenhower two years into his term. Based on FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, Trump is currently the second-most unpopular president, after Ronald Reagan.

Our friends at ABC News are live streaming the State of the Union tonight. Watch them here. (And look out for analysis from our own Clare Malone!)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is overseeing her first State of the Union since 2010, when Democrats last had control of the House. She and President Trump have been at loggerheads over border wall funding. But her opposition to Trump has helped her with her party’s base: CNN recently found her with a 42 percent favorable rating (vs. 47 percent unfavorable), her highest favorable rating in a CNN poll since April 2007. Her improvement is largely associated with a 22 point rise in her favorability among liberal Democrats.

I don’t have a good instinct for how bad the damage from the new Warren revelations will be. Or, actually, I have conflicting instincts. One of which is that “this is already baked in” and won’t affect much. And the other one of which is pretty much the opposite, that it’s really problematic, both because she’d seemed to deny that she’d done stuff like this before and because this is likely to cause a lot of offense to Native Americans and possibly with some other nonwhite voters too. So that’s … not very helpful, I guess.

Trump was just introduced; shaking lots of hands now.

Government shutdown talk is likely to feature prominently tonight. Congress has yet to pass a bill fully funding the federal government (the deadline is Feb. 15), and Trump has not ruled out another shutdown as he tries to secure funding for a wall along the U.S-Mexico border.

The recent shutdown did not go so well for Trump, however. His job approval rating is currently 39.9, down 2.3 points from 42.2 percent on Dec. 21, the day before the partial government shutdown began. And a FiveThirtyEight analysis found a nearly 5 point increase in the percentage of Americans who said they blamed Trump for the shutdown in polls conducted just after the start of the shutdown and during the last week of the shutdown in January.

Unless something drastically changes, there’s really no reason to think a second shutdown would go any better for Trump. Trump’s approval rating has held steady at around 40 percent since the government reopened, and the public doesn’t seem like it has the appetite for another shutdown. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted last week asked respondents whether they would support another partial government shutdown if an agreement to fund the government didn’t include funding for the border wall: 57 percent of Americans said they would oppose another shutdown, while 39 percent said they would support one.

So interesting to see Mitt Romney as just one of the crowd on the Senate floor! I’m very interested to see the camera pan to him during the speech …

Energy Secretary Rick Perry is the designated survivor tonight. As designated survivor, Perry is taken to a secure and undisclosed location outside of Washington, where he will stay with Secret Service agents until the State of the Union speech ends.

The number of presidential candidates in the chamber tonight is a reminder of how Congress-heavy the Democratic presidential field is. A governor could really stand out, despite the vast number of candidates.

For a while it looked like we might not get a regular State of the Union this year. During the government shutdown, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Trump uninviting him from the original date for the speech, Jan. 29. Since it was initially unclear if or when a new date might be set, there was a week or so there when we thought the State of the Union (which has been a spoken oration every year since 1981) would have to be delivered in writing, or perhaps Trump would take it on the road — to a campaign rally, or to a state capitol.

But it wasn’t the first time this decade that bad blood between an executive and his legislature threatened a major speech. In 2015, the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives accepted a job as the president of a charity. Republican then-Gov. Paul LePage responded by threatening to pull state funding from a school run by the charity, and the charity rescinded its job offer. The incident inspired an unsuccessful push to impeach LePage. The relationship got so toxic that LePage refused to deliver the traditional State of the State speech (a governor’s equivalent of the State of the Union) before the legislature the following year. Instead, he sent them a scathing State of the State letter that railed against “socialists, career politicians and their allies in media.”

So I’ve been the one routinely defending the State of the Union, but I can’t dismiss some of my colleagues’ critiques about televised presidential addresses. They run long. They’re not interactive. And viewership varies widely from year to year.

But it’s not like the current format of the State of the Union is required by the Constitution. In fact, the format has already evolved several times: for many years it was a written message to Congress, then it became an address delivered in person, and then, in the 1960s, it turned into a televised affair. Many think the last real change to the format may have been President Reagan’s decision to start inviting special guests in the 1980s. But maybe it’s time for a greater change. Here are a few ideas:

1. The president could do a joint town hall with someone in Congress from the other party. This format would allow for more interaction, which audiences seem to like, and it would put Congress on more equal footing with the president. But the risk is if it’s too interactive, it might not actually fulfill the president’s Constitutional obligation to “give to the Congress information of the state of the union” and “recommend … measures.”
2. This brings me to my second idea: A State of the Union via Twitter thread or a Reddit Ask Me Anything. Obama and Trump have both done Reddit AMAs in other contexts. Why not join up with a Congressperson or two and have a discussion in an online forum? One reason could be the fear that moving democracy entirely online could increase technology gaps, excluding people with lower incomes and people who aren’t yet comfortable with these tools. Not to mention, it might lack some of the current pomp and circumstance surrounding the event.
3. Which means you could always … bring back the written address! I’ve explained a number of times why the speech is useful, but if the main complaint is that the speech is too partisan and too focused on the public rather than Congress, then maybe it makes sense to go back to a written message that explains the priorities of the administration and takes stock of problems facing the nation.

As we await the State of the Union, the 2020 Democratic primary campaign continues to rage in the background. Today, The Washington Post released an interview with Elizabeth Warren in which she apologized for claiming that she has Native American heritage. The article included a new document obtained by the Post in which Warren claimed her race was “American Indian” in 1986. It’s a reminder that the issue will continue to follow Warren despite her attempts to put it behind her.

In a battle of presidential verboseness, President Trump might take the cake: His first official State of the Union lasted 80 minutes, longer than all but two such speeches going back to at least Richard Nixon.

Only Bill Clinton spent more time speaking from the House rostrum — in 1995, he spent 85 minutes talking, and in 2000, he spoke for nearly 89 minutes. But over the course of his seven addresses, Clinton averaged 75 minutes per speech, which is less than where Trump currently stands. That said, Trump has only given one State of the Union, so his average could change dramatically tonight. Especially if he delivers something more like his 2017 speech — technically not a State of the Union — which was only 60 minutes long.

If Trump’s past public speeches are any guide, the president will invoke God a lot tonight. A new academic paper that analyzed the strategic use of religious language in presidential addresses found that Trump has been more likely to use religious terms and mention God than any president in the period since Franklin D. Roosevelt held the office:

State of the Union addresses, on average, are less steeped in religious language than other sorts of addresses (inaugural speeches, for example), but Trump’s speech tonight will probably still invoke religion.

Presidents love using State of the Union addresses to ask Congress to do stuff. According to research by political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard, the average State of the Union from 1965 to 2015 (plus non-SOTU joint addresses to Congress but minus the addresses in 1969, 1973 and 1977) contained 34 policy proposals.

But how many of them were fully realized within a year of the speech? As you can see in the chart below, it’s a bit of a crapshoot:

According to Hoffman and Howard, only about 25 percent of State of the Union proposals from this period were fully enacted within a year. Some presidents were more successful than others, of course — for example, 67 percent of Lyndon B. Johnson’s proposals came true after his 1965 speech, while only 9 percent of George W. Bush’s did after his 2004 address. But higher success rates tended to happen when the president’s party was in control of Congress. For example, the Democrat-majority 111th Congress fully passed 33 percent of the proposals in President Barack Obama’s 2009 address and 49 percent of the proposals in his 2010 address. But once Republicans took control of the House, only 26 percent of Obama’s proposals in 2011 and 14 percent of his proposals in 2012 were fully adopted. With Democrats now in control of the House but Trump in the White House, chances are that we’re in for another era of unproductivity.

Trump is expected to hit a bunch of topics — immigration, taxes, foreign policy, etc. — in tonight’s State of the Union address. But do public speeches actually move public opinion on issues?

The answer: No, but it’s a little complicated. (Check out here for a review of academic scholarship on this question.) Research has found that State of the Union addresses typically don’t change people’s opinions but that presidents do have some success in setting the legislative agenda. In other words, it is unlikely that Trump will convince any free-trade true-believers to support trade barriers tonight, but what he might accomplish is to effectively force Congress to give attention to his alternative to NAFTA and other issues that his address prioritizes.

All that said, that same study concluded that the power of the president to set Congress’s legislative agenda is conditional on the president’s popularity. With Trump’s job approval rating at about 40 percent, Congress may prove less than super responsive.

The State of the Union is meant for all Americans, but historically, viewership has skewed decidedly partisan. For example, take a look at the chart below, which shows polls conducted after these speeches going back to President George H.W. Bush. You can see that generally more viewers have identified with the president’s party than the out-of-power party.

That said, there is a chance that voters from both parties may want to tune in tonight, considering that the longest government shutdown in history just ended and the fight over border wall funding must reach some kind of resolution by Feb. 15, when the government budget expires again.

Will President Trump’s approval rating go up after his speech tonight? I think it might — but that rise probably won’t have anything to do with the State of the Union. Historical polling data from Gallup shows that a president’s approval rating is just as likely to go down after a State of the Union as it is to go up. Most likely, the speech will barely move the needle. On average, the last 35 State of the Union addresses were worth just a 0.2-point increase in a president’s approval rating.

So why do I think his approval rating might rise anyway? Well, it’s currently at its lowest point in nearly a year, and the dip is almost certainly because of the government shutdown. However, history tells us that the political ramifications of a shutdown tend to fade over time. So assuming we don’t get another shutdown on Feb. 15, I expect Trump’s approval rating to gradually bump back up to the low 40s.

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s live coverage of President Trump’s second State of the Union address. It could actually be newsworthy, for a change. That’s not something I would say for most State of the Union speeches, but I’m mildly interested in tonight’s address for several reasons, as I outlined earlier today. You can check out that article in full, but, briefly, here’s why:

The fight over the border wall isn’t over yet. And tonight’s speech should give us clues about what strategy Trump might take next. He has essentially three options:

• Agree to a longer-term budget deal without border wall money and just move on.
• Agree to a longer-term budget deal without border wall money but declare a national emergency so that he can use executive powers to designate funds to build the border wall.
• Decline to declare a national emergency but also refuse to sign a bill to fund the government unless it includes border wall money.

All of those options present problems for Trump and Republicans, as we’ll discuss tonight, so it’ll be interesting to see which direction the president seems to be heading.

The second reason that I’m looking forward to tonight’s speech is that Trump may try to … pivot, or half-pivot. Trump’s advisers are saying that the speech will strike a “unifying, bipartisan and optimistic tone.” A more collegial, centrist message from Trump would be a huge deal in terms of 2020 and his re-election chances. If, that is, he can maintain it rather than reverting to his usual rhetoric after a day or two. That’s obviously a big “if.”

Finally, Stacey Abrams has a chance to defy the streak of bad State of the Union responses and further her star potential. Abrams is in a position where most politicians have failed. But maybe the “curse” of the rebuttal has become well-known enough that Abrams, a former Georgia state representative who narrowly lost her bid last year to become the state’s governor, could be deemed successful with a merely competent speech. Or maybe not. It’s a hard speech to get right.

In any case, stick around and watch it all unfold with us here. If you have questions for anyone on our live blog team, send them to @538politics, and we’ll answer them here. Thanks for joining!