About a month into his presidency, Joe Biden is consistently earning higher levels of public approval than ex-President Donald Trump consistently got at any point during his entire four years in power. In a newly released Gallup survey, 67 percent of overall respondents said that they approved of Biden’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he’s been tackling through efforts to increase vaccine distribution and secure a new economic relief package from Congress, the latter of which is slated to be ready around mid-March. Meanwhile, in the Gallup survey, a full 56 percent of overall respondents said that they approved of Biden’s overall job performance.
Gallup poll:
67% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the coronavirus.
56% of Americans approve of Biden's overall job performance.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 23, 2021
Biden also got good numbers on his handling of foreign affairs and the economy. A full 56 percent of overall respondents said that they approved of the president’s handling of foreign affairs, while 54 percent of overall respondents said that they approved of his handling of the economy. For context, at no point in his entire term did Trump ever hit an average of 50 percent approval for his overall job performance in the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight of relevant surveys. When he left office, FiveThirtyEight reports that the average level of approval for his overall job performance was just 38.6 percent, meaning that Biden’s current level of overall support according to Gallup is almost 20 percent higher than Trump’s recent level.
In FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average of surveys measuring overall approval for Joe Biden, the president is at 54.4 percent, with an average of 38 percent of overall respondents saying that they disapprove of Biden’s overall job performance. These numbers are almost the exact opposite of Trump’s own recent approval and disapproval numbers — although he still has some support within the Republican Party and will be speaking at this year’s edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
In the Gallup survey, a perhaps surprising number of Republicans expressed support for Biden’s handling of COVID-19. A full 34 percent of Republican respondents expressed that approval, alongside 66 percent of independents and 95 percent of Democrats. Overall, as mentioned, 67 percent of all respondents expressed support for Biden’s COVID-19 handling, which is much higher than the level of support that Trump got for his COVID-19 response by the end of his term. In late October, merely 40 percent of Gallup respondents said that they approved of Trump’s COVID-19 response.
