As the Biden administration continues to work diligently to deal with the fallout of the Trump era, a new poll has revealed that Joe Biden has the support of a majority of young Americans. A full 63 percent of the college students who are registered voters and participated in a new Harvard survey said that they viewed Biden favorably, a measure that reflects their opinions of the president as a person. Among respondents from the same poll, a full 59 percent said that they approved of the job that Biden is doing as president — which isn’t that far off from his favorability level.
Biden’s favorability rating of 63 percent in the new poll represents a higher level of support among college voters than any other president has ever received during the 21 years that Harvard has conducted the survey. Notably, Biden is also outperforming his own past numbers — in last year’s edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, only 34 percent of young adults said that they viewed Biden favorably. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was still somewhat open (until Bernie Sanders’ withdrawal on April 9, at least) and Biden had not yet assumed his present position of top leadership among Democrats.
Biden has also earned high approval numbers from the general public. The FiveThirtyEight weighted average of approval surveys revealed that, as of this Friday afternoon, Biden had the approval of an average of 53.4 percent of the general population. This number is well beyond what Trump had while in office — in the FiveThirtyEight weighted average of surveys regarding public opinion of Trump while serving as president, he never even hit 50 percent and left office with the approval of an average of under 40 percent of the population. That’s an over 10 percent difference between Trump and Biden.
Biden’s policy initiatives, like his COVID-19 economic relief package and his infrastructure spending proposal, have also repeatedly garnered very high levels of support in polling, including from Republicans. These high levels of support for Biden and key components of his agenda could, in theory, help propel Democrats to a new round of victories in the upcoming midterm elections in 2022.
