TAMPA, Fla. — Vic DiMaio was born in Ybor City and raised in West Tampa, and has been a Democrat for as long as he can remember.

What You Need To Know

  • Although annual messages from the president to Congress started from the early part of our country, it was Franklin Roosevelt who coined the phrase “the State of the Union.”

  • President Ronald Reagan started the practice of inviting special guests to the State of the Union in 1982.

  • This is President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address, and it comes with his public approval ratings hovering around 40 percent.

“If you know anything about the history of Tampa, we only had Democrats. There were no Republicans to be found,” he said on Tuesday while he ordered a Cuban sandwich from Cacciatore & Sons, an Italian meat market and deli in West Tampa.

DiMaio strongly supported Joe Biden when he ran for president in 2020, saying that he was the perfect antidote to the previous four years of tumult under Donald Trump.

“They wanted calmness. They wanted peace. They wanted tranquility. They were just tired of the Trump madness,” he says of the general public's decision to elect the former longtime Delaware U.S. Senator and Vice-President under Barack Obama.

The president is facing a very skeptical public right now as he prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address tonight from Washington.

His poll numbers are stunningly low, hovering just under 40% overall. A Quinnipiac survey conducted over the weekend has Biden at 38% approval and 52% disapproval, while USA Today/Suffolk has him at 39% approval and 57% disapproval.

Those low numbers can be attributed to the highest rate of inflation in nearly four decades, a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan last summer that critics dubbed a debacle, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Yet DiMaio believes that the country can unite under Biden when it comes to supporting Ukraine as they battle Vladimir Putin’s military forces.

“I think that this crisis sadly enough has galvanized a lot of people to work together and I think that if you had a choice between Trump and Biden and Biden is the cool, calm, collected guy that everybody respected,” he says.

Whether one speech from Biden can reverse his current political standings is, of course, something that will only be determined in the days and weeks after tonight, but his early handling of this foreign policy crisis hasn’t really moved the needle. A Morning Consult survey released on Monday afternoon shows that Biden has not received a bounce from the events overseas.