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One month ago, Joe Biden's initial approval ratings were pretty normal for recent presidents — worse than Barack Obama's, better than Donald Trump's, but otherwise unremarkable. What was unusual were his initial disapproval ratings, which were much higher than every previous polling-era president other than Trump.
A month later, the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregator has barely moved for Biden's approval: It was estimated at 54.2% then, and 54.4% now.
But his disapproval has actually been creeping higher, from 34.7% in late January to 38.3% entering March. Some of this may just be statistical noise; Biden actually started out at 36.0%, improved a little over the first few days, and then has been slowly deteriorating since. He's still nowhere close to Trump, who was at 50.1% disapproval at this point. But he's far higher than all the other polling-era presidents. (Note: George H.W. Bush is excluded from this discussion because there were not yet enough approval polls about him in 1989 for FiveThirtyEight to estimate how he was doing.)
As I said a month ago, this is almost certainly about polarization, not Biden. At one point, approving of a new president was almost a default setting. Even the most partisan voters would typically start by telling pollsters that they were undecided. So it's not just that the first four newly elected presidents of the polling era (Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter) all had at least a 60% approval rating at this point. It's that none of them had as much as a 10% disapproval rating. Ronald Reagan was at 17% disapproval so far, and everyone since then had at least a fifth of those polled disapproving of their performance. The undecided category is dropping out. Ike's approval plus disapproval at the end of February totaled 75%, while at least 90% of those surveyed had an opinion about Obama, Trump and Biden. For what it's worth, Trump, Obama, Clinton and Reagan all had bigger increases in their disapproval from their starting point to the end of February than Biden has had so far.
That's not to say that disapproval ratings can only go up. Clinton and Reagan both reached over 50% during their first terms, and then had extended rallies which eventually cut their disapproval ratings in half. George W. Bush's disapproval had reached about 36% before the Sept. 11 attacks, but that didn't prevent his approval rating from spiking to well over 80% soon after, meaning that quite a few people flipped from disapproval to approval. But what does seem to be the case is that far more people who are not from the president's party thinking he's doing a bad job, instead of waiting to see what he does.
Of course, when the outgoing president refuses to attend the new one's inauguration and falsely claims that the election was stolen — as opposed to congratulating him and wishing him well, as for example Carter did for Reagan and Bush did for Clinton — it's not surprising that many Republicans already disapprove of Biden.
By the way: Once upon a time, out-parties used to wait to harshly criticize the new president, not necessarily out of respect for democratic norms, but because they didn't want to immediately put themselves on the other side of the majority (or at least the plurality) of the electorate, which after all had just chosen the new president. Democrats in 2001 and 2017 didn't have that reason to withhold judgment, given the splits between the Electoral College and the popular vote in those elections. Republicans in 1993, 2009 (to a lesser extent) and 2021 have either convinced themselves that their electoral losses weren't real or decided that they're only interested in appealing to their own strongest supporters anyway. Or both. That certainly didn't appear to hurt Republicans early in the Clinton and Obama presidencies; I guess we'll see whether the same pattern holds this time.
1. Jessica Trisko Darden at the Monkey Cage on the protests in Myanmar.
2. Ryan Mulcahy talks with Suzanne Mettler about white supremacy, U.S. democracy and the Jan. 6 riot.
3. Janna Deitz talks with Sarah Binder about Congress and the Biden administration (and part two here).
4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Clara Ferreira Marques on the polio vaccine.
5. Perry Bacon Jr. on the split within Democrats on the threat to democracy.
6. And Meagan Flynn and Julie Zauzmer on efforts to reverse the fortress version of Capitol Hill. Yes, please, and very soon. 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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