President Joe Biden’s job approval ratings continue to fall in his second year in the White House, with only 40% of Americans approving of the job he is doing, according to a new NBC News poll.
That is Biden’s lowest rating during his presidency.
Biden’s three-point drop in job approval since January comes as a large majority of Americans continue to believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, according to the poll.
According to the poll, 71 percent of respondents believe the country is “on the wrong track.” That is one percentage point fewer than the proportion of respondents who gave that answer in the same poll conducted in mid-January.
The latest bad news for Biden comes as he leads a Western coalition supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, Americans face inflation rates not seen since the 1980s, and the United States enters the third full year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“What this poll indicates is that President Biden and the Democrats are on the verge of a disastrous election,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinions Strategy, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, told NBC News.
Over the course of four days last week, the poll surveyed 1,000 adults, 790 of whom were registered voters. It has a 3.1 percent margin of error among all respondents.
In mid-term elections, the political party of the incumbent president typically loses seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the November 2022 elections, all 435 House seats will be up for grabs, while 35 Senate seats will be up for grabs.
In the House, Democrats have a slim 12-vote majority.
Democrats control the Senate only because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, which can tip the scales in their favour if all 48 Democrats and the two independent senators who caucus with them vote as a bloc against the 50 GOP senators.
Biden’s public approval rating has plummeted since assuming office in January 2021 after defeating then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Trump has recently made it clear that he intends to run for the Republican presidential nomination again in 2024.
Biden said Thursday that he would be “very fortunate” to face Trump in the next election, a remark that may be justified given Trump’s own relatively high negative approval ratings.
However, the Democratic incumbent finds himself in an ever-widening public approval chasm.
Since assuming office in January 2021 after defeating then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Biden’s public approval rating has plummeted.
Trump recently stated his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination again in 2024.
Biden stated on Thursday that he would be “very fortunate” to face Trump in the next election, a statement that may be justified given Trump’s own relatively high negative approval ratings.
The Democratic incumbent, on the other hand, is facing an ever-widening public approval chasm.
Three months later, the numbers had shifted dramatically, with 36% believing the country was heading in the right direction and 56% believing the opposite.
Following that, however, Americans became more pessimistic, with only 22% believing the country is heading in the right direction, a figure that has not changed since October’s NBC poll.
When asked how they felt about Biden, 37 percent of Americans said they felt very positive or somewhat positive about him. Sixty-six percent of those polled said they had very negative or somewhat negative feelings about him.
When asked about Trump, 36% of those polled said they had very positive or somewhat positive feelings about him. Half of those polled had very negative or somewhat negative feelings toward the former president.
