You may not know it based on the stalled components of his policy agenda, but President Joe Biden is preparing to deliver his first State of the Union address to a Congress that has delivered him a historically high level of success.
Despite a narrow House majority and 50-50 Senate that’s only under his party’s control because Vice President Kamala Harris has a tiebreaker vote, Biden enjoyed significant success when the clerk actually called the roll during his first year in office.
CQ Roll Call’s annual vote studies reveal that the president was successful on 96.5 percent of 2021 Senate votes on which he took a position, the third-highest success rate in the study’s 67-year history. It continues a trend of success in the first year of an administration, as Biden was behind only the first years of his two most recent predecessors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
