| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. We already have the first hint of President Joe Biden's popularity at the earliest stage of his presidency: The FiveThirtyEight estimate has him at 54.2% approval and 34.7% disapproval. The most obvious comparison is to former President Donald Trump, who never came close to those numbers. He started out in 2017 at 44.1% approval and 42.2% disapproval. That was close to the best rating of his presidency, and his disapproval marks rapidly moved above 50% and stayed there. Trump started lower; President Barack Obama started higher. The other recent presidents, from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, started more or less in the same approval range that Biden occupies now. Before Reagan and the current era of partisan polarization, newly elected presidents typically started out quite a bit more popular. Jimmy Carter, for example, registered 66% approval at the earliest stage of his presidency, and actually spiked up higher before things started to unravel. That kind of early surge has been fairly common for newly elected presidents during the polling era, from Dwight Eisenhower on. Only Trump, Obama and George H.W. Bush failed to improve on their initial rating at some point during their first 100 days, and Bush's rating rose soon after that marker. So we shouldn't assume that Biden's mid-50s approval will mark a peak. On the downside for Biden, his mid-30s disapproval number is the second-worst of the polling era, beating only Trump. We can almost certainly attribute that to partisan polarization rather than to anything Biden did. Early-term disapproval has been rising steadily over the last several presidencies. Whether this means that Biden will face a low ceiling or not is unknown, but if he ever is to reach the point where two-thirds approve of the job that he's doing as president, as most polling-era presidents have at least briefly, he'll need to convert some people who started off actively opposed to him. That's presumably a lot harder than picking up support from those who start out neutral. It does appear that Biden is taking the popular side of quite a few issues early in his administration. HuffPost and Morning Consult have polled on many of the topics of his executive actions, and all of them have either plurality or majority support in those surveys. It also seems likely that the major elements of his first legislative package will poll well — direct broad-based relief payments have polled well over the last year, for example, and I would guess an overwhelming majority supports spending on delivering vaccines and other efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. We'll see if those things remain popular, and whether any of them pass into law. In the longer run, however, it's policy outcomes that will determine Biden's popularity, not what people think of his policy proposals. Do early approval ratings matter? In one way, they do not: Early approval ratings do not predict how things will look when it's time for midterm congressional and state races or the president's re-election. They do matter to some extent now, however. For one thing, a president who is perceived as popular will tend to have a better bargaining position when dealing with members of Congress, interest groups, executive-branch bureaucrats and others. For another, a popular president will help his or her party recruit candidates and depress recruitment for the out-party; an unpopular president has the opposite effect. In general, candidates are not as important as they once were to electoral success, but parties would still rather have their popular incumbents run for another term and their best potential candidates step up to run. Recruitment for state-level 2022 elections is well underway, and has started for contests for the U.S. House of Representatives. 1. Karleen West on studying insurrections — and then having it hit close to home. 2. Matthew Nelsen at the Monkey Cage on how high schools teach U.S. history. 3. Zach C. Cohen and Erin Durkin on the Senate's slow pace on confirming executive branch nominations. 4. Here at Bloomberg Opinion, Amanda Little talks climate policy with Biden's top environmental diplomat, John Kerry. 5. And Chris Stirewalt on Fox News. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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