Poll: Biden Ends First Year in Office with Worst Approval Rating Yet, Trails Trump at Same Point in Presidency
President Joe Biden’s approval rating continues to fall, with a new poll showing it has sunk below that of former President Donald Trump at the one-year marks in their presidencies.
Biden has a 40 percent approval rating, according to the latest Politico/Morning Consult poll.
Meanwhile, 56 percent disapprove of Biden’s job while in office.
The survey of 2,005 registered voters, conducted Saturday and Sunday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Biden began strong, with a 66 percent approval rating in a Politico/Morning Consult poll after his first 100 days in office. But by November, his approval had gone through a freefall and was at 44 percent.
Trump, who during his first year in office battled the political headwinds of the since-discredited allegations of his campaign’s links to Russia, had a 44 percent approval rating in January 2018, according to Politico.
The new poll showed that only 6 percent of those surveyed gave Biden the grade of A for his first year in office, while 40 percent gave him an F.
As one would expect, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain downplayed the numbers, according to Politico.
“It does not surprise me that despite progress on Covid, despite progress on the economy, voters are not going to give us a passing grade yet,” he said. “But President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.”
Even one liberal commentator acknowledged the White House has lost control of events.
“It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. You can divide his year pretty evenly, with the president starting by doing some important things to get the country back on track,” Robert Gibbs, a press secretary to former President Barack Obama, told Politico. “But what started in August with Afghanistan, to me, is that since then this is a White House that has been shaped by external events, it isn’t doing the shaping of those events.”
Another observer said that there seems to be no path forward for Biden.
“He has some big accomplishments, but his agenda seems to have no path forward, and inflation really looms as a problem for the country,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “It is certainly not a stalled presidency, but he starts the new year with lots of trouble.”
A Republican strategist said Biden failed to hear what voters wanted.
“They misread their mandate,” Alice Stewart told Politico. “Their mandate was to unify the country and put an end to COVID. But he has been persuaded by the left to try to enact transformational change and social spending and election reform that the public does not want.”
In an Op-Ed in The Washington Post on Tuesday, former presidential speechwriter Marc Thiessen said Biden is making matters worse by refusing to adapt.
“Biden is not changing strategy. Instead, he appears set to deliver yet another speech telling Americans, ‘I’m doing a great job, you just don’t realize it yet.’ If he does, it will backfire,” Thiessen wrote.
He said Biden’s speech Wednesday summing up his first year in office is nothing more than “a revisionist history of the entire first year of his presidency.”
“Sorry, but you can’t boast about your COVID strategy when 55 percent disapprove of it,” Thiessen wrote. “You can’t brag about your economic performance when 60 percent say it has been dismal.
“You can’t crow about your foreign policy when 55 percent believe you’re doing a terrible job as commander in chief. You can’t talk about how you’ve united the country, when a 49 percent plurality say you’ve done more to divide us.
“And you can’t say you’ve had a great first year in office when 63 percent say we’re on the wrong track.”
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