Photo courtesy of President Biden/ Instagram.
According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, President Joe Biden has reached a 53 percent disapproval rating for job performance. The president’s disapproval rating was only 43 percent two months ago.
The poll was conducted between Sept.13-19 and surveyed 10,371 Americans. Only 51 percent approve of how Biden has handled the coronavirus pandemic. However, that number declined from March, when his approval rating was 65 percent.
Democrats gave the president a 75 percent approval rating, down 13 percent from his 88 percent approval rating in July. Only nine percent of Republicans approve of Biden’s performance, down from 17 percent just two months ago.
The polls also suggest that Americans, in general, are no longer optimistic about the state of the country.
Seventy-four percent said they were dissatisfied with how things in the country are going, up 13 percent from March, and 37 percent said that things would be worse in one year. Thirty-four percent said that they expected no change.
Keith Whittington is a politics professor at Princeton University and said that Biden’s ratings are down because he decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, party in-fighting and the southern border debacle. The rise of COVID-19 cases is also a factor.
“He’s had a bad run between issues on the border, the way the pandemic is beginning to shape up, and Afghanistan,” he said. “The administration has struggled on the policy side and struggled in ways that people care about and so you’d expect that to do some damage to a president’s public approval ratings.”
Only 34 percent of Americans believe that Biden can unite the country, a 14 percent decline from March. Forty-three percent said that they think the president is mentally sharp, down from 54 percent from March. Only 24 percent of Americans are satisfied with his handling of Afghanistan, while 48 percent disapproved.
Biden’s approval rating also dropped with minorities. In March, Black Americans strongly approved of Biden’s job performance by 67 percent, but that number has fallen to 49 percent. Hispanic Americans support by 34 percent, and Asian Americans approve by 27 percent.