Biden's micro bump

How else to explain marginal POTUS movement -- except for SOTU?

Seven weeks ago President Joe Biden delivered a State of the Union address to a viewership of 32 million people that was roundly hailed as a success. 

From “fiery” and “a big night” … all the way up to “one of the most politically effective speeches in American history,” the sublime reviews splashed POTUS with the fairy dust he needed to rekindle optimism around a candidacy that felt old and tired and derelict. 

But it wouldn’t matter as the world turned, as in, one speech couldn’t produce a meaningful, lasting change in his polling numbers against Donald Trump. 

That was my working theory – and that of the experts.

Because, history.

There was no evidence a SOTU speech this late in a presidency was consequential, reminded veteran Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

Dan Pfieffer, who tends to see the glass half full for Democrats in his weekly analysis of news events, curbed enthusiasm on his Substack. A State of the Union bounce is “apocryphal – it’s basically Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Often talked about, but never seen,” he wrote on March 21. “There’s a very simple reason Biden didn’t get a bounce from the State of the Union—it never happens.”

But while history is instructive, get too attached to the piece of it you know best and you sound like Brit Hume analogizing 2024 politics to the 1980s when there was no internet or Iphone or TikTok.

Nearly a full two months from the speech, the evidence points to