Analysis: What the polls agree on about Biden’s approval rating
But digging into the underlying numbers reveals a clearer consensus across a number of areas — how high Biden’s negatives are, how his ratings have trended since taking office, and how deeply polarized they are.
Notably, however, the polls provide a much narrower range in their estimates of how many people disapprove of Biden — all seven of those surveys put Biden’s disapproval rating somewhere between 48% and 52%. Instead, a good chunk of the variation has to do with the share of Americans who say they aren’t sure. Two of Biden’s worst recent polls, the Quinnipiac and Grinnell surveys, both found 12% saying they’re unsure about Biden’s job performance, or declining to offer an opinion. In the CNN, CBS and AP-NORC polls, by contrast, 1% or fewer didn’t weigh in.
Why are pollsters finding such different levels of uncertainty? A lot of it probably has to do with the way they’re conducted. Polls conducted using telephone interviews — including the Quinnipiac, Grinnell and Gallup polls, generally don’t read off “not sure” as a possible response to their questions, but their interviewees will sometimes volunteer it, anyway. Some pollsters push harder than others to prompt wavering respondents to share which of the options they’re leaning toward.
Among polls conducted online, as the other four surveys are, procedures can range from providing respondents with an explicit option to say they’re uncertain to all but requiring them to answer a question before continuing the survey.
Given that, one explanation is that these polls aren’t telling contradictory stories so much as one, somewhat more nuanced one, along these lines: About one-eighth of the public doesn’t hold particularly strong views about Biden, but if prompted, they’re probably lukewarmly positive on balance.
