President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address

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President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address during a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber.

When President Joe Biden took to the House Chamber on Tuesday for his annual State of the Union address, his message was one of unadulterated optimism – even in the face of open hostility.

The spectacle of Biden smiling and offering a pointed riposte through multiple rounds of heckling from some House Republicans was, in many ways, an apt illustration of his presidency and a useful preview of his likely 2024 candidacy.

A majority of Americans say he hasn’t accomplished much, many Democrats aren’t thrilled at the prospect of him running for reelection and he faces clear disdain from most Republicans. But Biden powered through. Delivering what was widely viewed as a test run for his reelection announcement, Biden claimed credit for progress made during his first two years in office while stressing the job isn’t finished.

He faced sometimes-unruly Republicans, with whom he spiritedly sparred from the podium on spending cuts. The feisty display drew cheers inside the White House and offered the best preview to date of the energy Biden hopes to bring to the campaign trail soon.

The speech carried a strain of populism rooted in strengthening the middle class – vintage Biden, but delivered at a pivotal moment for his political future.

No president enters his State of the Union wanting to recite a laundry list of accomplishments and proposals, but – almost inevitably – the speech often veers in that direction. Biden’s was no different, even as the president sought to tie everything together with a refrain of “finish the job” – a phrase that appeared 12 times in his prepared text.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Connecting with Americans: If there is one political conundrum Biden’s advisers are urgently working to solve, it is why so many Americans seem to believe he has accomplished so little. By all accounts, Biden has passed large, historic pieces of legislation that could have transformational effects on the US economy. But polls show large majorities aren’t feeling them.

Biden hoped in his speech to bridge that gap, to demonstrate he cares about what Americans care about and to identify the problems he’s looking to fix.

Bipartisanship: Working across the aisle was a theme throughout Biden’s speech. He started the address by acknowledging Congressional leaders from both parties, saying he is looking forward to working with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“Mr. Speaker, I don’t want to ruin your reputation but I look forward to working together,” Biden said as he launched into his speech.

He acknowledged that over the first years of his presidency, “we disagreed plenty.” But he appealed to his political rivals for cooperation.

“To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together in this Congress as well,” he said. “I signed over 300 bipartisan laws since becoming President,” the president added.

China: The country was included in the text of Biden’s speech well before a suspected spy balloon slipped into American airspace. But the incursion, which has generated a diplomatic backlash from China and drawn second-guessing from Republicans, lent new urgency to Biden’s message about competing with Beijing.

Biden and his aides believe steps to counter China are one of the rare areas where he could find bipartisan support. He saw some success on that front with the passage of a law boosting US semiconductor production last year.

Spars with Republicans: For the first 45 minutes of Biden’s address, that appeared to be the play for both sides. But when Biden began castigating Republicans for plans that would slash Social Security and Medicare, the decorum dropped. His accusations seemed to provoke Republicans, who lobbed accusations of “liar” from their seats in the chamber.

As lawmakers like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden, McCarthy was silent – but his glare into the crowd spoke for itself. Later he found himself shushing his conference multiple times at outbursts interrupting the president.

Republicans look to “new generation”: The GOP’s choice to deliver their response to Biden’s speech, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is – at 40 years old – the nation’s youngest governor. Half the president’s age, her selection was a clear choice to contrast a different generation of leaders.

While she cited her tenure as White House press secretary to Donald Trump, she did not rely heavily on her association with the former president. Instead, she appeared to call for a changing of the guard – an appeal for generational change that could apply as much to Democrats and Biden as it could to Republicans and Trump. “It’s time for a new generation to lead. This is our moment. This is our opportunity,” she said.

Watch CNN White House reporter Maegan Vazquez break down the speech on TikTok.

CNN tracked approximately how many minutes President Joe Biden spent talking about different topics during his second State of the Union address.

Here is a breakdown of the time Biden spent on each:

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:

President Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

Biden delivers remarks in front of a full House chamber on Tuesday.

Rodney and RowVaugh Wells, the parents of Tyre Nichols, receive a standing ovation during Biden's speech.

Biden shakes hands with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

From left, Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson stand next to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy clap as people enter the House chamber ahead of Biden's speech.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers the Republican response to the State of the Union address by President Joe Biden on February 7 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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.

Eggs are displayed on shelves at a store in Portland, Maine, on January 27, 2023.

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 U.N. Ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley speaks during the Iowa Republican Party's Lincoln Dinner, on June 24, 2021, in West Des Moines, Iowa.

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:

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02:08 • Source: 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. 

Former President Donald Trump released a video message recorded before president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address where he criticized the current administration for inflation, the ongoing border crisis and rising crime rates.  

“Here’s the real State of the Union,” Trump opened.

He accused Biden’s administration of “waging war on free speech,” “leading us to the brink of World War III” and weaponizing the Department of Justice.

“On top of all of that, he’s the most corrupt president in American history,” he said. “And it’s not even close.”

At the end of his two-minute video, Trump reminded viewers that he intends to run for president “to end the destruction of our country and to complete the unfinished business of making America great again.”

Senator Joe Manchin is seen in Statuary Hall ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin strongly criticized the Republican representatives who heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address, saying it was “awful, childish” and “distasteful.”

“No matter who does that, it’s just not acceptable, awful, childish, it’s not who we are as a country,” Manchin said. He also said he “hopes” Speaker Kevin McCarthy “says something about it.” 

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin also added it was “really unbefitting.”

McCarthy didn’t comment to CNN when asked about the heckling from Republicans.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise wouldn’t criticize his members, instead calling on Biden to stop his rhetoric about a GOP push to cut entitlements.

Some context: The yelling started when the president accused some Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare.

The White House has repeatedly accused Republicans of wanting to make cuts to the programs, but McCarthy explicitly said recently that those cuts were off the table. 

Former vice president and potential 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence said on Twitter that President Biden’s State of the Union shows that it’s “time for new Republican leadership” to get back to the Trump-Pence administration’s “strength and prosperity.” 

“Tonight’s #SOTU showed one thing: That it is time for new Republican leadership to get our Nation back to the strength and prosperity we had under the Trump-Pence Administration,” Pence wrote on Twitter.

He then went on to list what he called “Biden’s failed leadership at home,” noting high inflation and gas prices, and Biden’s “failed leadership abroad,” pointing to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the “disastrous” Afghanistan withdrawal.

Pence also argued that Biden’s police reform bill “would be a disaster for law enforcement and the American people they serve. It would leave an under-equipped, underfunded, and demoralized police force even worse off,” he said in another tweet.

“If we want to improve policing in America, we can’t kneecap police in America. That will only make police more afraid to do their job and more likely to make a bad decision in the moment,” he added.

Rep. George Santos watches as Biden arrives to deliver his State of the Union address.

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney recounted a heated interaction during State of the Union with GOP Rep. George Santos. Romney said he told Santos that he doesn’t belong in Congress.

He strongly criticized Santos for standing in the front aisle “trying to shake hands” with President Joe Biden and senators “given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation.”

He also told CNN’s Manu Raju that “yes” he’s disappointed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hasn’t called on Santos to resign. 

Romney, a Republican from Utah, continued to blast Santos saying: “He says he, you know, that he embellished his record. Look, embellishing is saying you got an A when you got an A-. Lying is saying you graduated from a college that you didn’t even attend and he shouldn’t be in Congress. And they’re gonna go through the process and hopefully get him out … But he shouldn’t be there and if he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there.”

Rep. Juan Ciscomani from Arizona delivered the Republican Spanish-language response to the State of the Union address and said the country is at a “critical point” in its history.

More on Ciscomani: When he was elected in November 2022, Ciscomani became the first Latino Republican elected to Congress from Arizona. He was born in Mexico and immigrated to the US with his family as a child, previously worked at the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and was a senior adviser to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

The tradition of a Spanish-language response started in 2004. This year will be the first Spanish response to the address since 2020. 

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the GOP response in English.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders waits to deliver the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address.

Arkansas’ Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders called for a new generation of GOP leadership in her party’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

She pointed to the economy and inflation, seeking to draw a generational contrast with Biden.

“At 40 I’m the youngest governor in the country. At 80 he is the oldest president in American history,” she added.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders criticized President Joe Biden’s foreign policies in dealing with China and US border security.

“The Biden administration refuses to secure the border and save American lives. And after years of Democrat attacks on law enforcement and calls to defund the police, violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear,” she said Tuesday in the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address. 

“Beyond our border, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, from North Korea to Iran, President Biden’s weakness puts our nation and the world at risk,” she said. “And the president’s refusal to stand up to China, our most formidable adversary, is dangerous and unacceptable.

“President Biden is unwilling to defend our border, defend our skies and defend our people. He is simply unfit to serve as commander-in-chief,” she added.

In calling to revive the Democrats’ enhancement of the child tax credit in 2021, President Biden pointed to the fact that the provision helped slash the child poverty rate that year. 

“Let’s restore the full child tax credit, which gave tens of millions of parents some breathing room and cut child poverty in half, to the lowest level in history,” he said. 

Facts First: This is true. The child poverty rate was cut nearly in half in 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was the major factor. The enhancement accounted for the bulk of the reduction.  

The child poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, according to the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.  

That’s a reduction of 46%, sending the rate to the lowest level since the supplemental measure began in 2009. 

The child tax credit – both the traditional credit and the enhancement – reduced the child poverty rate from 9.2% to 5.2%, or 43%, according to the Census Bureau. Without the beefed-up credit, the rate would have only fallen from 9.2% to 8.1%, or 12%. 

As part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that passed in March 2021, Congress enhanced the child tax credit for one year, beefing up payments to $3,600 for each child up to age 6 and $3,000 for each one ages 6 through 17, for lower- and middle-income families. For the first time, half the credit was paid in monthly installments from July through December, while parents could claim the other half when they filed their 2021 taxes this year. 

Also, more low-income parents became eligible for the full amount because lawmakers made it fully refundable.