President Biden's 2023 State of the Union address

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address hit on themes of bipartisanship and economic reform. It was widely viewed as a test run for his reelection announcement.

See photos from the speech:

Arkansas' GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that after former President Donald Trump left office, President Joe Biden inherited a “world that was stable and at peace.” 

Facts First: It’s obviously ridiculous to claim that there was world peace when Trump’s tenure ended, and calling the world “stable” is a subjective claim. 

When Trump left the White House in 2021, there were still plenty of wars ongoing around the world — albeit not as many as under previous presidents, and very few of those conflicts directly involved American armed forces.  

For instance, Trump did not end the war in Afghanistan, which was still ongoing when Biden took office. There were thousands of US troops in the country when Biden was sworn in, before he withdrew them all in 2021.  

The long-running Yemeni civil war was still happening when Trump left office. (Under Trump and Obama, the US supported Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the war through arms sales. Biden ended that policy in 2021.) 

The Syrian civil war was also ongoing, though at a more isolated level than in past years. And a war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region was in full swing. The drug war in Mexico was still leading to deaths and disappearances. 

Additionally, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region was still unresolved. The war began in 2014, but had settled into a “frozen conflict,” with Russian proxies occupying a large chunk of the eastern Donbas region, and Ukrainian troops dug into trenches. It escalated into a full-blown war when Russia invaded in February 2022, after Biden had already taken office. 

In the official Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Biden administration and Democrats have largely called to defund the police.  

“After years of Democratic attacks on law enforcement, and calls to defund the police, violent criminals room free,” she said.  

Facts First: While some Democrats have joined calls for a radical shift in police policy, including a reduction in police budgets, Biden and top congressional Democrats have not supported and even rejected calls to "defund the police." 

It's worth noting that the slogan "defund the police" means different things to different activists — from the dissolution of police forces to partial reductions in funding.  

That being said, Biden in particular has explicitly stated his opposition to abolishing or defunding the police several times. 

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told CBS, "No, I don't support defunding the police." Rather, he said, "I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community." 

Attacking Biden and Democrats on police funding is not a new tactic from Republicans. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, several ads from Republican candidates attempted to create the inaccurate impression that the Democratic candidates they were targeting supported defunding the police. Some of the Republican ads simply made things up. Other ads falsely described bills the Democratic candidates have supported. Still other ads tried guilt by association, noting that the candidates have supporters who have called to defund the police but not mentioning that the candidates themselves rejected defunding the police.

Both Republicans and Democrats sounded off after a tense address from President Biden that included heckling from Republican members, who called him a “liar” at some points during the speech.

Democrat Rep. Mark Takano told CNN’s Manu Raju that the outbursts were “disgraceful.”

“It’s the decline in decorum. I’ve been in this Congress for 10 years, and that was uncalled for, the level of disrespect,” he added, noting it was a “new low.”

“This cannot be normalized. It’s troubling," he added.  

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said she was “not surprised” by the heckling “after what we saw in the speaker’s race,” but praised President Biden for his handling of the situation. “Joe Biden owned that room. No matter what they did, he responded with a twinkle in his eye,” she said. “He used humor when appropriate, he pushed back, he showed strength. And so it didn’t matter what they yelled at him, he won that night in a big way.”

Republican Rep. Mark Alford told CNN’s Manu Raju, “I’m not into calling names. I grew up with three brothers and I always knew that when you’re calling names, you’re losing the argument.”

“I prefer personally to debate someone on intelligent thought and try to win them over through great argumentation. But I’m not going to judge my fellow Republicans on their actions, so I’ll leave that up to them," he said.

Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito did not go so far as to call the president a liar, instead saying that “he was definitely misunderstood.”

“I think that there were definitely some instances where he did not have the facts, and he didn’t understand or wasn’t sure of the facts, but the facts are what we said – people are not better off today than they were when he took office," he told CNN.

President Joe Biden said that “food inflation is coming down, not fast enough, but coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up.” 

Facts first: Biden's claims are true if he was comparing year-over-year growth rates to each other, but not if he was measuring inflation itself.

Food prices were up 10.4% in December 2022 from the year-before period, according to the latest available Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food price inflation, as measured by the CPI, has slowly declined since hitting a 40-year high of 11.4% in August 2022.  

Overall inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 6.5% in December 2022. The headline inflation rate has declined for six consecutive months since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.  

The CPI, which measures the average change in the prices over time of a basket of consumer goods, is one of several closely watched inflation barometers that also have showed price increases to have moderated in recent months. Within CPI and other indexes, there are various measures to gauge inflation. Most notably, “core” inflation measures that exclude items with more volatile price increases.  

Biden’s claim that take-home pay has gone up is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed.

However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in Jan. 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.  

There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period. 

A 72% majority of Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a smaller 34% reacting very positively.

That pattern of broad but tempered enthusiasm is similar to the reception for Biden’s speech last year. In 2022, 71% of speech-watchers reacted positively to his address, with 41% saying their reaction was very positive.

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress – in past years, most viewers reported positive reactions to third-year addresses from former presidents Donald Trump (76% positive), Barack Obama (84% positive) and George W. Bush (84% positive). The 34% who reacted very positively to Biden’s speech is the lowest in CNN’s speech reaction polls dating back to 1998.

Biden’s speech received a particularly warm reception from Democrats (62% had a very positive reaction), liberals (57% very positive) and older speech-watchers (52% very positive among those age 65 or older). Among those younger than 45, though, just 21% reported a very positive reaction, even as speech-watchers in this age group were just as likely as those age 65 or older to say that Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction (75% younger than 45 said so, as did 76% of those age 65 or older). 

State of the Union addresses rarely have major, lasting impact on presidents’ approval numbers, particularly in recent years. But Biden’s speech did bolster confidence in his policies among some who tuned in. Following the speech, 71% of speech watchers said they felt the policies Biden proposed would move the country in the right direction, versus 29% who said they would move things in the wrong direction. In a survey conducted before the speech, those same people were closer to evenly split (52% right direction, 47% wrong direction).

The biggest movement came among those who were skeptical of Biden to begin with. Among those who said in the pre-speech survey that they disapproved of the way Biden is handling his presidency, just 7% said before the speech that they thought Biden’s proposed policies would move the country in the right direction, rising to 45% post-speech. And among political independents, the share saying Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction rose from 40% pre-speech to 66% afterwards.

Overall, 66% who watched the address said that Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction on the economy – that’s in comparison to 62% of speech-watchers who said the same about his economic policies following his speech last year, and 72% following Biden’s first presidential address to Congress in 2021. The share of viewers this year who felt Biden’s economic policies would mark a shift in the right direction rose 16 percentage points following his speech. That shift was also heavily concentrated among independents, who went from 38% saying his economic proposals would move things in the right direction pre-speech to 64% post-speech. 

A two-thirds majority also said that Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction on foreign affairs (67%) with somewhat more modest majorities saying the same of his policies on gun laws (63%), government spending (59%) and immigration (55%). The share of viewers who said Biden’s immigration policies would move the country in the right direction rose 14 points post-speech. 

Roughly half of Americans who tuned in for the speech, 52%, said that Biden’s proposals struck the right balance ideologically, with 38% calling them too liberal and 11% not liberal enough. Most Biden disapprovers, 68%, called his proposals too liberal.

About two-thirds of all speech watchers, 67%, said Biden did enough to address racial injustice in his speech, though that was notably lower among people of color (58% said he did enough) than among White speech watchers (72%). Majorities overall said he did not do enough to address the US relationship with China (59%) or inflation (55%). 

Slightly over 6 in 10 speech watchers, 62%, said they had at least some confidence in Biden’s ability to provide real leadership for the country, with 28% expressing a lot of confidence. Another 38% said they had no real confidence.

More on the poll: Surveys were conducted by text message with 552 US adults who said they watched the State of the Union on Tuesday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech, and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points. 

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who plans to announce her 2024 presidential campaign next week, criticized President Joe Biden’s border and economic policies as he delivered his State of the Union address.  

“Joe Biden spin: My economic plan is working. Reality: Americans still can't afford groceries,” she said in the first of 15 tweets posted during the speech. 

The former South Carolina governor then tweeted a video that included news coverage of the record inflation seen under the Biden administration and her commentary on Fox News saying inflation is “the number one issue that American families are talking about.” 

She also focused her attacks on Biden’s border policies and posted a separate video showing media coverage of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. 

“Joe Biden spent two years refusing to tackle the border crisis he created. Mr. President, stop spinning and start doing your job,” Haley tweeted. 

She also attacked Biden over his policies related to China, claimed Russia was “emboldened” because of Biden and argued schools shouldn’t have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper that Republicans were "protesting too much" during President Joe Biden's State of the Union Address.

"I think they were protesting too much," she said about Republicans jeering at Biden when he mentioned during his speech that some Republicans considered making cuts to Medicare and Social Security to avoid hitting the debt ceiling.

The former House speaker famously tore up her copy of former President Donald Trump's 2020 State of the Union speech while sitting directly behind him. The act of protest happened at the conclusion of Trump's address, which began with the former president refusing to shake Pelosi's hand.

Watch Pelosi's comments on CNN:

President Biden said, "We’ve already created, with your help, 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years." 

Facts First: Biden's figures are correct; however, the "good-paying" qualifier is subjective and can't be independently verified for each of those 800,000-plus positions.  

The US economy added 803,000 manufacturing jobs from Biden's first full month in office, February 2021, through January 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job growth rate during Biden’s first two years in office was 6.58%. The last time a comparable growth rate was higher was in 1979. 

The average hourly wage in the manufacturing industry was $31.57 for all employees and $25.84 for production and non-supervisory positions in January, preliminary BLS data shows. Nationally, the average hourly wage was a projected $33.03.