The king has approval numbers the president would kill for
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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King Charles III has been a global celebrity since his mother’s coronation more than 70 years ago, and given that the world’s first memory of the then-prince was a toddler in a tailored short suit shaking the queen’s hand on the tarmac, the head of the United Kingdom often feels rather older. But next to the 80-year-old President Joe Biden during the U.S. president’s cursory visit to Windsor Castle, the 74-year-old monarch seemed almost sprightly.
So why did Biden descend upon London? More right-leaning and nationalist Brits have judged Biden’s sojourn a face-saving mission, as the president, who proudly hails from Irish ancestry, ticked off Tories by undercutting U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s candidacy to be the next NATO secretary general and sided with the European Union over the often-tested “special relationship.”
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But there’s perhaps a more immediate and self-interested purpose in Biden’s pit stop, namely that Biden, like most politicians on the planet, would still kill for the favorables maintained by the royal family.
Ipsos found that 63% of Brits approved of the King after his coronation, with only 17% disapproving. YouGov, which found ever so slightly less favor for Charles, still gave him a net +26 approval rating. The next generation fares even better: Prince William scores a +52 approval rating, and following the legacy of the last Princess of Wales, Princess Catherine has a +54 approval rating.
Compare that to Biden who has a net -14 rating, according to the data aggregation at FiveThirtyEight. Although Vice President Kamala Harris fares slightly better, at net -12, she recently became the lowest-rated vice president in the documented history of NBC News’s opinion polling.
One ought to expect an (ostensibly) nonpartisan monarch to maintain somewhat higher ratings than a partisan politician, but the gap between Charles vs. Biden and Harris vs. Katherine — 12 points and 40 points respectively — are chasms, not mere margins.
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Between their controversial, embarrassing failsons and their long waits for power, the president and the king have some parallels, but if anything, Biden’s enfeebled confusion next to Charles’s still-Boomer buoyancy made the comparison all the more devastating.
All politicians want to surround themselves with popular figures in the hopes a little goodwill rubs off on them, but when the fellow-senior citizen seems so much more vigorous, the monarch somehow seems more modern than the president.