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Part of the reason why State of the Union addresses don’t seem to affect presidents’ approval ratings is probably that they’re preaching to the choir. Most years, CNN* conducts a poll of State of the Union viewers shortly after the speech, and those viewers tend to disproportionately be of the same political party as the president. For example, last year, 41 percent of CNN’s sample were Democrats, while only 31 percent were Republicans and 28 percent were independents or members of another party.

Not every political event has to affect public opinion in order to matter, of course. The State of the Union is first and foremost a governing ritual: Traditionally, the speeches are a laundry list of policy proposals that the president would like Congress to pass. The only problem is, the speech doesn’t usually inspire much lawmaking either.

For years, political scientists Donna R. Hoffman and Alison D. Howard have logged every request presidents have made in their annual addresses to Congress.** Since 1965, only 24 percent of those requests were fully enacted, and another 13 percent were partially enacted. That’s a 63 percent failure rate. (Of course, in presidents’ defense, you don’t get anything unless you ask!)

Biden’s up against two extra challenges in this regard: Congress is under divided government, and it’s a presidential election year. As we saw with a recent border-security bill, Republicans are unlikely to allow the passage of any major legislation this year that Biden can chalk up as a win. Indeed, in the last two presidential election years (2016 and 2020), exactly zero of the president’s State of the Union requests became law.

However, the president also didn’t make that many requests in the first place; in 2016, President Barack Obama made only five, while Trump made only 12 in 2020. In both cases, that was significantly fewer requests than in their previous State of the Union addresses. This might have been a tacit admission that nothing was probably going to get done anyway, moving them to deliver a decidedly un-State of the Union-y State of the Union. It will be interesting if Biden follows suit and gives what is essentially a campaign speech instead.

But again, if he takes that tack, he shouldn’t expect it to matter. For better or worse, Biden’s political future doesn’t depend on Thursday’s speech. So perhaps he can just picture all of Congress in their underwear and relax.

Footnotes

*In conjunction with Gallup and USA Today from 1992 through 2006, with ORC International from 2007 through 2017 and with SSRS since 2018.

**This includes State of the Union addresses plus the speeches before a joint session of Congress that new presidents give shortly after being sworn in (which aren’t officially considered State of the Union addresses).

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