Are Biden's Poll Numbers Getting Better?

The State of the Union and start of the campaign are framing the choice for voters

Earlier this week, I argued that Biden’s State of the Union address was a success despite the absence of a discernible bounce in the polls. Cynical press coverage like this story from Yahoo News and concerns about the speech expressed publicly and privately by Democrats pushed an unfair, inaccurate, and unhelpful narrative. Based on my experience with campaigns, the State of the Union, and a reading of the polls, I believe Biden’s address accomplished what one could realistically hope.

The headline of my post was “Ignore the Polls, Biden's State of the Union was a Success.” Usually, when I write about polls, I get a handful of responses like:

• “The polls are wrong”

• “Remember the Red Wave? Neither do I”

• “This poll is hot garbage”

• “Why are you focusing on the polls this far out?”

This time, the response was quite different.

“Why would we ignore the polls when Biden is surging?”

This criticism hinges on the several positive polls that came out since the State of the Union. One of my rules is to focus on the polling averages and broader trends rather than obsess too much about an individual poll (I don’t always follow my own rules). And that’s the perspective I was writing from. At the time, Trump maintained an advantage of a couple of points in the major polling averages. That changed on Friday morning when Biden took the lead in the Economist’s polling average:

So what’s going on? Is that hope I feel?