Most Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s job performance, with most of the nearly six in ten citizens saying there’s literally nothing the Democrat has done since taking office of which they approve.
The finding, from a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS in January and February, highlights the entrenched politics driving the nation at the start of the midterm year, with little agreement across party lines on priorities for the government or how to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s approval ratings have fallen across the board, the survey found.
Just 41% approved of the way he’s handling his job while 58% disapproved, a significant drop from his approval numbers in CNN polling last year.
Just 36% of independents and 9% of Republicans approved. Although his approval rating still stood at 83% among Democrats, that was down from 94% late last summer.
“President Joe Biden often says America’s best days are ahead. It just doesn’t feel that way right now,” said White House Reporter Stephen Collinson in an analysis of the survey results. “A nation exhausted by a two-year pandemic, struggling against rising food and gas prices, driven to distraction by school closures and torn apart by a political schism that erupted into violence is far from at ease with itself.”
Biden has more strong detractors than he does fervent supporters, with 41% of Americans disapproving strongly of his performance versus 15% who strongly approved.
Some of the shift in Biden’s numbers comes from a change in Americans’ partisan tilt: Republicans and Democrats were about at parity in the new poll, with fewer identifying as Democrats than in previous polling.
When those who disapproved of Biden’s overall performance were asked to name a single thing he’d done that they did approve of, 56% had nothing positive to say.
One survey respondent wrote, “I’m hard-pressed to think of a single thing he has done that benefits the country,” despite major economic
Of those who generally approved of Biden, a smaller 26% couldn’t find anything negative to say. “I totally believe that he has the best interests of the American [p]eople in mind,” wrote another respondent. “I think he understands the severity and importance of his job and is doing the best he can.”
Overall, Americans said, 57% to 41%, that the first year of the Biden administration has been more of a failure than a success.
By comparison, Americans were split about evenly on how to define Barack Obama’s first year as president in January 2010.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating ticked up to 40%, his highest mark since last September but still the lowest for any elected president at the one-year mark since modern public opinion polling began, according to a CNN poll conducted in January 2018.
A majority of Americans, 55%, said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance, the worst approval rating at the end of a first year in the White House since the dawn of modern polling.
An increasing majority of Americans lack confidence that elections in the United States today reflect the will of the people, with about half thinking it is likely that a future election will be overturned for partisan reasons.
Trump lost the 2020 presidential election but he has consistently lied about that and made baseless claims that have been widely debunked by courts, nonpartisan election officials and some of the nation’s top Republicans. Still, many people believe the lies despite Trump’s penchant for dishonesty and his complete lack of credibility on the topic.
An 83% majority of Democrats called Biden’s first year a success — more than the 78% of Democrats who said the same about Obama in 2010.
The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from January 10 through February 6 among a random national sample of 1,527 adults initially reached by mail.
It’s the second survey CNN has conducted using this method. Surveys were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.