Only one-third of Americans gave President Biden a thumbs up on the job he is doing in the White House, according to a new national public opinion survey.
The president stands at 34% approval in a Monmouth University poll released on Monday, with 61% giving Biden a thumbs down on his job performance.
The president’s approval is at an all-time low in Monmouth polling since Biden took over the White House nearly three years ago.
Americans questioned in the survey gave the president particularly low marks for his handling of immigration (26%) and inflation (28%).
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“The Biden administration keeps touting their infrastructure investments and a host of positive economic indicators. Those data points may be factual, but most Americans are still smarting from higher prices caused by post-pandemic inflation. This seems to be what’s driving public opinion,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, highlighted. “There is political danger in pushing a message that basically tells people their take on their own situation is wrong.”
Murray spotlighted that “there is certainly an element of partisanship in how people frame their own financial situation, which is based in part on who occupies the White House. But even a good chunk of Biden’s Democratic base wish he’d start paying more attention to their top priorities than he is now.”
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The approval rating is a key indicator of a president’s performance, clout and popularity and is a closely watched metric, especially when an incumbent in the White House seeks a second term. The 81-year-old Biden is running for re-election in 2024.
The release of the Monmouth poll comes two weeks after the president stood at 37% approval – an all-time low – in a Wall Street Journal survey. However, a new Fox News national poll released on Sunday indicated Biden’s approval rating at 43%.
Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low to mid 50s during his first six months in the White House. However, the president’s numbers started sagging in August 2021 in the wake of Biden’s much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan and following a surge in COVID-19 cases that summer, mainly among unvaccinated people.
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The plunge in the president’s approval was also fueled by soaring inflation – which started spiking in the summer of 2021 and remains to date a major pocketbook concern with Americans – and the surge of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. along the southern border with Mexico.
Biden stands far below where his three most recent two-term predecessors – former Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama – stood at this point in their presidencies, as they successfully ran for re-election. The only recent president whose approval ratings were nearly as negative as Biden’s current numbers was his most recent predecessor, former President Trump, who was defeated by Biden in the 2020 election.
Biden once held the upper hand over Trump in 2024 rematch surveys, but Trump began enjoying an advantage over his successor in the White House in most polls starting in October.
On Sunday, as he was leaving his re-election campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the president was asked by reporters why he was down to Trump in the latest surveys.
“You’re reading the wrong polls,” Biden replied.
The Monmouth University poll was conducted Nov. 30-Dec 4, with 803 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.
