Addressing his first divided Congress, Biden says 'the soul of this nation is strong'

Biden might like to imagine that his State of the Union address is not only a chance to lay out his agenda for the country but also an opportunity to change a few Republican minds.

However, odds are that Biden’s audience mostly consists of people who already agree with him about most things: Democrats.

In his first two addresses to joint sessions of Congress in 2021 and 2022 (the first technically wasn’t a State of the Union), polls found that around half of the viewership identified as Democrats, while around one-fifth to one-quarter identified as Republicans.

There isn’t anything unusual about this sort of partisan gap, though: Historically, people who identify with the president’s party are more likely to watch the State of the Union, based on polling since Bill Clinton’s presidency.

In other words, the State of the Union can sometimes verge on a pep rally, with the president working to animate his supporters in the room and at home with applause lines. Now, Biden also made bipartisan and even nonpartisan overtures in an effort to appeal across and beyond party lines. But as the trend in the chart above suggests, far fewer Republicans are likely watching his speech than Democrats.

-FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley

Biden called on Congress to "restore the right that was taken away in Roe v. Wade," referring to nationwide abortion access, to a huge round of applause from Democrats. The Supreme Court is usually the most popular branch of government. But over the past few years -- particularly since the high court overruled Roe last summer -- Americans' views have diverged sharply by party. A poll conducted last August found that perspectives on the Supreme Court were historically polarized, with a gaping 45-point gap between Republicans and Democrats.

The sharp divide was driven by a nosedive in Democrats' views of the court. In the poll, only 28% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents had a favorable view of the court in August, down nearly 40 points from 2020. The shift is undoubtedly related to the Supreme Court's right turn since the fall of 2020, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, who was the third justice to be appointed by former President Donald Trump. Barrett ended up being a critical vote in the case that overruled Roe.

-FiveThirtyEight's Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

The president spent relatively little time in his speech talking about an issue that defined the first year of his presidency and the last year of his predecessor's time in office: COVID-19. Biden wrapped up remarks on the impacts of the pandemic throughout the nation, including the death of more than 1 million from the virus, and he said he would zealously seek to prosecute criminals who stole relief money meant to aid the nation through the depths of the virus' spread.

"And as we emerge from this crisis stronger, I'm also doubling down on prosecuting criminals who stole relief money meant to keep workers and small businesses afloat during the pandemic," Biden said.

"Now, let's triple our anti-fraud strike forces going after these criminals, double the statute of limitations on these crimes and crack down on identity fraud by criminal syndicates stealing billions of dollars from the American people."

Biden's remarks come after the GOP-led House Oversight Committee held its first hearing of the 118th Congress on COVID-19 "fraudsters" who engaged in the "massive waste, fraud and abuse in COVID relief programs."

"We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history," Chairman James Comer said in his opening statement.

The parents of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man who was attacked by Memphis, Tennessee, police officers and later died, were present at Tuesday's State of the Union, where President Biden encouraged lawmakers to "come together and finish the job on police reform."

That may be easier said than done, though. A compromise on a federal policing bill died in the Senate in 2021 and key GOP lawmakers have already expressed skepticism that federal police reform measures would have prevented Nichols's death.

Another issue, though, is that many Republican voters don't think that there's a systemic issue with policing, according to recent polls. A new ABC News/Washington Post survey, for example, found that 72% of Republicans are confident that the police treat both Black and white people equally, compared with just 14% of Democrats. Another survey by the Pew Research Center, meanwhile, found that 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaners said that police across the country do at least a good job at treating racial and ethnic groups equally, while just 18% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners voiced the same opinion.

Of course, that's not to say reform can't happen. Biden and the Congressional Black Caucus are talking about what reforms they want to see passed. But even though some polls show an overall drop in confidence toward the police since July 2020, gains in support for reform, among white Americans in particular, tend to be fleeting. So action on policing is anything but a sure-fire thing.

-FiveThirtyEight's Alex Samuels