Nate at Five Thirty Eight has up some Biden related stats that are interesting. The data comes from Ramussen approval ratings that show how various vice presidential picks would’ve played with the general population, divided by political affiliation. Democrats were 77% in favor of Hillary Clinton, 65% in favor of Joe Biden. But only 17% were unfavorable of Biden while 22% were unfavorable of Clinton. I’m going to ignore the Republican data because it seems unlikely that any Democrat V.P. pick would be enough to woo them across the aisle. But Independents are definitely in play and that’s where Biden outperforms Clinton. Biden has a 42% favorable, 29% unfavorable rating among Independents. Clinton would only pull a 39% favorable and a massive 57% unfavorable.

Nate also points out that the newly released Rasmussen data suggesting a gendered backlash against Biden (women are the ones that dislike the choice) means less than it would initially seem:

What’s interesting is that the gender gap is different between the several formulations of the question that Rasmussen employed. There is a big difference in the question of whether Biden was “the right pick” — apparently seeming to indicate that, for many women, any pick other than Hillary was not going to be the right pick. But there isn’t very much difference in favorability scores for Biden, nor upon the prospective impact upon one’s vote. So the message that women seem to be sending is that: (1) yeah, we’re kind of ticked; but, (2) it’s nothing personal against Biden, and (3) we’ll probably get over it.

I personally have no real opinion of Joe Biden either way. He’s got a mixed track record on many issues (and I’ll have a post up about that soon) but that’s to be expected from someone that’s been in the Senate longer than I’ve been alive.