Mar 3, 2022 - Politics & Policy

Exclusive poll: Democrats and Republicans on the SOTU

Image showing side-by-side word clouds for how Democrats and Republicans reacted to President Biden's State of the Union speech

Data: Momentive

Americans who watched President Biden's State of the Union address generally thought he gave Russia's invasion of Ukraine the right amount of attention — but they wanted more about the economy, according to a new Axios-Momentive poll.

The big picture: Democrats and Republicans expressed diametrically opposed reactions to Tuesday's speech.

  • "Excellent," "hopeful" and "strong" were the words Democrats used most to describe his remarks.
  • "Lies," "poor" and "weak" were Republicans' top words.
  • "Hopeful" and "lies" reflected independents' divisions.

By the numbers: 34% of respondents said they tuned in, while another 32% followed news coverage of the speech.

  • Democrats (40%) watched with more frequency than Republicans (35%) or independents (22%).
  • Half of seniors — but one in five respondents under age 35 — watched.
  • Respondents were asked whether Biden spent the right amount, too much or not enough attention on various topics. More than half said he gave the right amount of attention to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, health care and policing.
  • The economy drew the highest share among subjects that respondents said deserved more attention — 43%. Just 6% said he spent too much time talking about the economy.

Methodology: This Momentive online poll was conducted March 1-2, 2022, among a national sample of 2,762 adults. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the Momentive platform each day. The modeled error estimate for this survey is +/-2 percentage points.

  • Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over.
Go deeper