The number of visitors for President Biden at the White House has plummeted this year. Are so few POTUS visits in Jan. and Feb. an indication Biden is not in control at the White House?
Each month the White House publishes a visitor log update from three months before. The February 2024 visitor logs were released on June 7 — about a week later than usual.
These logs reveal a visitor’s name, the name of the person visited (the “visitee”), and limited information about each event, such as start and end time, and location. The number of people at each event is also shown.
President Biden is the person visited when the logs show the visitee name is “POTUS,” President of the United States. Likewise, visitees can be VPOTUS, Vice President Kamala Harris, and FLOTUS, First Lady Jill Biden.
Visitor logs from Jan. this year showed 317 visited President Joe Biden that month, which was the lowest count in almost two years when there were only 200 visitors in Feb. 2022 near the end of COVID closures.
In Feb. this year the 781 POTUS visitors represented the lowest count since Nov. 2022 when there were only 608.
Biden had no White House meetings reported for 18 of the 29 days in Feb., and a single meeting scheduled on five other days. Only on six days did he have more than one meeting.
Even with these low White House meeting counts in Jan. and Feb., the White House published a video on how busy Biden was in Jan. and separate video for Feb.
POTUS visitor counts dropped for Jan. and Feb. 2023 over Dec. 2022 levels, but the early 2024 drop was a bit lower than in early 2023.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” The New York Times said Biden’s age and memory rise to the center of the 2024 Presidential campaign.
Are the many fewer Jan. and Feb. meetings with President Biden at the White House an indication he may not be the person in control? What other explanations exist?
The number of visitors seeing Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House is small most months, but with a few exceptions, like Dec. 2022 and Dec. 2023.
Are the FLOTUS visits fairly small nearly every month because Jill Biden is helping with her husband’s duties?
These logs will be studied each month to learn more about how many, or how few, events President Biden participates in at the White House to see how that compares with the past.
The charts and tables below reveal summary information from all the visitor logs released during the Biden administration.
White House Visitors, 2021-2024
Chart
Numbers
February 2024 Visitors and Events
Charts
White House Visitors
Each event can have a number of visitors, so visitor counts can sometimes disguise a relatively small number of events having a large number of visitors.
For example, in Feb. 2024 nearly 70% of Biden’s events were on only three days (Jan. 6, 12 and 24) where he met nearly 90% of his visitors for the month.
White House Events
Numbers
White House Staff and Tourist Visitors, 2021-2024
The visitors in the White House logs can be assigned categories: POTUS, VPOTUS, FLOTUS, Staff and Tourist.
This plot shows Staff and Tourist visitors to the White House dwarf the POTUS+VPOTUS+FLOTUS counts.
POTUS visit counts were very low in Jan. and Feb. 2024, but staff and tourist visitor counts were above the levels from the same months in 2023.
Related
Most frequent POTUS visitors from Jan. 2021 through March 2023.
 | White House Let Nearly 10,000 Tour East Wing `Gifts from the Heart` in Days Before Christmas During COVID Closure in 2021EARL F GLYNN·FEBRUARY 20, 2023Read full story |
GitHub repository with details of processing White House visitor logs from June 7, 2024.
Earl Glynn – Watchdog Lab
Earl F. Glynn is a mostly-retired data scientist, scientific programmer, software engineer and physical scientist living in the Kansas City metro area, and the publisher of the substack Watchdog Lab.
