Biden Approval Rating Dropped 30 Points in 2021, Worst Dive in 75 Years

Democrats are starting 2022 at a serious disadvantage. President Biden has dropped 30 points in approval rating on average since the start of his presidency almost one year ago. Congress hasn’t been able to pass any of Biden’s domestic agenda, and a wave of retirements continue to hamper their efforts for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.

No president since World War II has seen such a stiff drop in their first year as Biden has. His numbers have practically turned upside down, accelerated by the Afghanistan crisis over the summer, and exacerbated by continued failures on the Covid-19 front.

The eroding approval support may be irreversible at this point as there appears to be no digging out from one botched crisis after another:

President Biden leaves 2021 with 43 percent approval from American voters per the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of major polls, with 53 percent disapproving.

The numbers are upside-down from inauguration day 2021, when the president in the  same RCP average stood at 57 approval and just 37 percent disapproval.

Add it all up, and Biden has shifted negatively by more than 30 points. No president since World War II – not even Donald Trump – has seen such a massive slide.

Democrats can fool themselves into thinking no president was more unpopular than Donald Trump, but the numbers speak for themselves. Biden has lost support from independents and Democrats at break-neck speed over just 11 short months since his inauguration.

Ironically, the bar for Biden was set very low but he still couldn’t meet it. He promised to return “normalcy” to the White House and a “steady hand” of leadership. What he delivered was the most chaotic US troop withdrawal since Vietnam and a failure to prepare for a winter Covid-19 wave that continues to drag down the country. Also, don’t forget record inflation.

Add that up, and it’s no wonder that on average, Biden now trails Donald Trump by five points in a hypothetical rematch if the next presidential election was held today:

After President Joe Biden’s approval rating plummeted over the course of 2021, the commander-in-chief is starting out the new year trailing former President Donald Trump by nearly 5 points in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, according to an average of recent polls.

An average of recent polls compiled by Real Clear Politics shows Trump leading Biden by 4.8 percentage points. About 46 percent of voters support the former president and just 41.2 percent back the current occupant of the White House. The polls included in the average were conducted between November 3 and December 19.

If anyone had predicted that by January of 2022, Joe Biden would have lost 30 approval points on average from his inauguration day in 2021, they’d be laughed out of the room and banned from Twitter for promoting misinformation.

Part of Biden’s problem is that instead of putting together a competent and experienced team around him, he, or whoever runs his administration, picked cabinet members to check off diversity boxes rather than select the best candidate for the position.

Surely there was someone more experienced and competent than Pete Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation in the middle of a supply chain crisis that continues to worsen? Yes, there are plenty of them, but Buttigieg needed a job, and Biden had to repay him for his primary campaign endorsement.

So, here we sit entering 2022 with a hobbled White House that you’d think would have nowhere to go but up. Somehow, I suspect, they’ll figure out how to dig the hole deeper since everything Biden touches gets worse than it was before.


Nate Ashworth

The Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Election Central. He's been blogging elections and politics for over a decade. He started covering the 2008 Presidential Election which turned into a full-time political blog in 2012 and 2016 that continues today.

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