As Biden nears 100 days, polls show deep partisan divides (2024)

Most Americans say things are going right in the country, an A.P./NORC poll finds.

Sixty-three percent of Americans said they approved of the work Biden was doing as president, while just 36 percent disapproved. That spread of 27 percentage points represents the widest approval margin in an A.P./NORC poll since Mr. Biden took office.

The president continued to receive broadly positive marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with seven in 10 respondents expressing approval. His approach to health care policy got a thumbs-up from 62 percent of Americans, and 54 percent approved of his work on foreign policy.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans said they approved of the job he was doing on the economy, while just 42 percent disapproved — although the poll was conducted from April 29 to May 3, before the administration released a disappointing April jobs report showing that the country was missing its targets on employment.

With migrants continuing to arrive at the southern border in high numbers, the poll found that just 43 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of immigration. Fifty-four percent disapproved.

But for the first time in A.P./NORC polling going back four years, a majority of Americans said that the country was headed in the right direction — possibly driven in part by the decline in coronavirus cases nationwide.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said things were going right in the country, while 44 percent said things were on the wrong track. That shift is being fed by a rise in optimism among political independents: Nearly half of them said that things were moving in the right direction, according to the poll.

Since January, the A.P./NORC poll has consistently found at least six in 10 Americans approving of the president’s job performance, putting it on the more Biden-friendly end of the polling spectrum. (NORC polls are conducted using its probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, with most respondents completing the survey online and a small number contacted by phone.) But polling averages consistently show Mr. Biden’s approval rating over 50 percent.

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As Biden nears 100 days, polls show deep partisan divides

The surveys, from Fox News, NBC News and ABC News/The Washington Post, found that Mr. Biden is considerably more popular at the 100-day mark than his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, but his approval is well behind that of most other modern presidents at this point in their first terms.

The ABC/Post poll found 52 percent of Americans approving of his performance and 42 percent disapproving. Comparing those numbers with past ABC/Post and Gallup surveys, he is less popular at 100 days than any other president since World War II except for Mr. Trump and Gerald Ford (who at this point had just issued a highly unpopular pardon to Richard Nixon).

The NBC News poll put his approval at a similar level, 53 percent to 39 percent, and the Fox poll, which surveyed only registered voters, had it at 54 percent to 43 percent.

In all three of the new polls, the president’s rating among Democrats was nearly unanimous —at least nine in 10 approved of his performance. Among independents, he was just below 50 percent approval in the Fox and ABC/Post polls; the NBC poll, which classifies only the most firmly nonpartisan of voters as independents, had his approval with these unaffiliated voters at 61 percent. His support among Republicans was stuck around one in 10.

Eighty-two percent of respondents to the NBC poll said they thought the country was more divided than it was united, roughly on par with recent years.

Mr. Biden continues to enjoy broad approval for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic; in all three polls, he received his highest marks for his work to confront this issue. And the ABC/Post poll reaffirmed what other recent surveys had found: that the $2 trillion stimulus package Mr. Biden signed last month is broadly popular, with 65 percent of Americans saying they supported it.

But with vaccines now widely available and concern about the virus ebbing, Mr. Biden will soon confront a political landscape no longer defined by the one issue that has been his strong suit. Just 41 percent of voters said in the Fox poll that they were very concerned about the spread of the virus — the first time since the outbreak began last winter that Fox had found less than half of the country’s voters taking that position. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they thought the worst of the pandemic was behind us, according to the NBC survey.

As he looks to advance an ambitious policy agenda, Mr. Biden appears vulnerable to Republican attacks on his handling of the migration surge at the southern border. Approval of his handling of the border situation was very low— stuck in the mid-30s, according to all three polls.

But both the Fox and ABC/Post surveys also found that there is more support than opposition for his next major policy priority: the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure package that he recently unveiled. Asked specifically about Mr. Biden’s proposals to pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, public support in both polls was considerably higher,with around three in five respondents supporting those ideas.

The ABC/Post poll found that by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans said they would prefer to see the president seek common ground with Republicans, rather than muscling through major policy changes without them —that’s despite the popularity of the Covid-19 relief package, which was passed without Republican buy-in.

Notably, that survey also found a roughly even split between the share of Americans expressing a preference for smaller government with fewer services, and those wanting a larger one with more services. Forty-eight percent chose smaller government, and 45 percent said larger.

Not since before the Clinton administration had the preference for smaller government fallen below 50 percent of Americans, according to ABC/Post polling going back to the 1980s.

Republicans’ support for voting rights has dropped.

People’s feelings on how democracy ought to be carried out — including whether voting should be made harder or easier — may now be just as likely to be correlated to their political identity as they are to their views on actual political issues.

That is the message coming from a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday, which finds that Republicans increasingly oppose measures that would expand access to the ballot — particularly those that former President Donald J. Trump frequently complained about during the 2020 campaign.

The percentage of Republicans and independents leaning toward the G.O.P. who said that voters should be able to vote early or absentee without a reason plummeted, from 57 percent three years ago to 38 percent in the new poll.

Until the most recent election cycle, when Mr. Trump drummed up opposition to absentee and early voting in an attempt to improve his electoral chances, those methods were largely seen as being at least as beneficial to Republican candidates as to Democrats.

The caving-in of Republican support has driven a drop of eight percentage points in overall support for universal no-excuse early voting. Still, 63 percent of all Americans remain in favor of it.

Republican support for the practice of automatically registering citizens to vote also dropped, to 38 percent, an 11-point dip since 2018. Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, 82 percent said they supported automatic voter registration.

Establishing automatic voter registration and requiring states to hold early voting for at least two weeks are elements of H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a sweeping voting-rights bill that was passed last month by the Democratically controlled House. It would need at least 10 Republican votes to pass in the Senate, support that’s unlikely to materialize. Some congressional Democrats are now urging the party’s leaders to shift their focus toward a narrower bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which had initially been proposed as a complement to H.R. 1.

But the Pew poll found that other proposals included in the For the People Act — like restoring voting rights to felons and making Election Day a national holiday — did retain the support of a solid majority in both parties, possibly a reflection of the fact that right-wing news media outlets haven’t targeted those proposals for attacks as frequently as they have others.

Another particularly popular idea was to make early in-person voting standard (the poll question did not mention whether this kind of voting would be allowed without an excuse). Nearly four in five Americans supported making early voting available at least two weeks before Election Day, including 63 percent of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats, the poll found.

The survey was conducted among 5,109 adults nationwide via Pew’s American Trends Panel, which uses a probability-based model to draw a sample that is representative of the national population.

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Biden’s approval rating rises, helped by the vaccine distribution push.

Those are among the results of a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday that offers a portrait of a country that is increasingly positive about its political leaders.

As Mr. Biden nears his 100th day in office, his approval rating stood at 59 percent, according to the poll, with 39 percent of respondents disapproving of his performance in office. That’s a small but meaningful uptick from his 54 percent approval in a Pew poll last month.

In the most recent survey, two-thirds of the country approved of the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 aid package that Mr. Biden recently signed, though approval cleaved hard to party lines. Forty-nine percent of all respondents said they expected the package to have a positive effect on them and their family; just 14 percent thought it would affect them negatively.

The president got particularly high marks with regard to managing and distributing coronavirus vaccines. Seventy-two percent of Americans said his administration had done this well, including 55 percent of Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P.,according to the poll.

The public gives Mr. Biden’s predecessor some credit for helping to make vaccines available: 55 percent said the Trump administration had done a good or excellent job supporting the development of coronavirus vaccines. But fewer, 43 percent, said the Trump White House had been successful when it came to getting the vaccines made and distributed.

Forty-four percent of respondents said Mr. Biden had changed the “tone and nature” of the political discourse for the better, while just 29 percent said he had made them worse. Republicans were an exception, with 62 percent saying he had altered the conversation for the worse and 11 percent saying for the better.

Americans’ increasingly positive views about the politicians in Washington extended to their representatives in Congress. For the first time in almost two decades, half of Americans expressed approval of the job that congressional Democrats were doing, while 47 percent disapproved.

Americans’ views of their representatives in Washington have long been rather dismal, and for congressional Republicans, public approval remains deeply negative: Just 32 percent approved of their performance.

Over all, just 36 percent of the country expressed a generally favorable opinion of Congress. Still, that was as high as it has been at any point in the past decade.

Asked for their thoughts on 15 political and social issues, respondents were most likely to rate the affordability of health care as a very serious problem, according to the poll. Fifty-six percent said so, with another 30 percent saying it was a moderately big problem.

The Biden administration has not put health care at the top of its priorities list, partly an acknowledgment of how thorny the issue has been for previous presidents, and of how divided Democrats remain on whether to push for a single-payer system.

But concerns about health costs decisively outpaced other issues, including the federal debt (49 percent), illegal immigration (48 percent), gun violence (48 percent) and the coronavirus outbreak (47 percent) in terms of the share of Americans calling the matter a big issue.

The poll was conducted from April 5 to 11 and reached 5,109 respondents via Pew’s American Trends Panel, which uses a probability-based model to draw a sample that is representative of the national population.

Nearly half of Republicans say they don’t want a Covid vaccine, a big public health challenge.

But more than two in five Republicans said they would avoid getting vaccinated if possible, suggesting that President Biden has not succeeded in his effort to depoliticize the vaccines — andleaving open the question of whether the country will be able to achieve herd immunity without a stronger push from Republican leaders to bring their voters on board.

The results of the Monmouth poll lined up with those of a separate survey by Quinnipiac University, also released on Wednesday, that found 45 percent of Republicans saying they did not plan to get vaccinated.

Among Democrats, two-thirds have already received at least one vaccine dose, according to the Monmouth poll. Just over half that share of Republicans have done so (36 percent).

When it comes to confronting the pandemic, Americans generally give positive marks to the president and to their state’s governor; both were seen as handling the pandemic well by 62 percent of Americans, according to the Monmouth poll.

But Americans don’t have as much faith in one another: Just 43 percent said the general public had done a good job dealing with the outbreak. Democrats in particular were disappointed in their fellow citizens, with just one in three saying the public had handled it well.

With public health experts warning that there could be another surge in Covid-19 cases if the economy reopens too swiftly this spring, the Quinnipiac poll found that 85 percent of Democrats said they were worried about another outbreak. Just 32 percent of Republicans shared their concern.

And while hardly any Democrats — just 12 percent — said they would feel safe attending large events like professional sports games or concerts, two-thirds of Republicans said they would.

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Democrats never loved Biden during the campaign. But now, his approval is nearly universal.

Yet in the first few months of his administration, Mr. Biden has garnered almost universal approval from members of his party, according to polls, emerging as a kind of man-for-all-Democrats after an election year riddled with intraparty squabbling.

He began his term this winter with an approval rating of 98 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup. This represents a remarkable measure of partisan consensus — outpacing even the strongest moments of Republican unity during the presidency of Mr. Trump, whose political brand depended heavily on the devotion of his G.O.P. base.

And as Mr. Biden nears his 100th day in office, most public polls have consistently shown him retaining the approval of more than nine in 10 Democrats nationwide.

Pollsters and political observers mostly agree that Mr. Biden’s popularity among members of his party is driven by a combination of their gratitude to him for getting Mr. Trump out of office and their sense that Mr. Biden has refused to compromise on major Democratic priorities.

“He has this ability to appeal to all factions of the party, which is no surprise to the centrists, but somewhat of a surprise to the progressives,” Patrick Murray, the director of polling at Monmouth University, said in an interview.

During the primary, Mr. Biden was the establishment figure, a Washington centrist in a diverse field that included a number of younger and more progressive rivals. While he won a plurality of Democrats, he struggled to win support from the party’s younger and more liberal voters.

But as president, he has been governing much like a progressive without abandoning his longtime public identity as a moderate.

“He has found a winning formula, at least for now,” said David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama. “His tone and tenure reassure moderates and his agenda thrills progressives.”

The Covid-19 relief bill enjoys broad popularity, and many Americans say they need the money.

By more than two to one, respondents said they approved of the bill, although Republicans were more likely to be opposed to it. Forty-nine percent of independents said they liked the bill, while just 16 percent disliked it. Four in five Democrats were in favor of it. Fifty percent of Republicans expressed disapproval.

In an indication of the need that the bill’s stimulus payments are seeking to address, 54 percent of respondents who expected to receive or had already gotten stimulus payments said they would spend most of the money on bills or use it to pay off debt. Twenty-three percent said they would put the money into savings.

With access to virus vaccines becoming widespread, optimism about the future is on the rise. Half of respondents said the country was headed in the right direction, more than at any point since the A.P./NORC poll started asking the question, shortly after the start of Donald Trump’s presidency four years ago.

Forty-six percent of the country said the economy was in good shape, a higher share than at any point since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. That lines up with the most recent Consumer Confidence Index, a weekly measure of economic attitudes, which on Thursday reached its highest level since the start of the pandemic.

Roughly two in five respondents to theA.P./NORC poll said they had already been vaccinated.

The poll was conducted from March 25 to March 29, using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel. Most respondents completed the survey online, with a small number contacted by phone.

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Four in 10 Republicans say the Capitol rioters’ anger was justified.

But it is a substantial minority on these questions — a subset of respondents, aligned with the Republican Party, who see the violence as justified and President Biden’s election victory as irredeemably fraudulent — that may be the most noteworthy finding from these surveys, released by Monmouth University on Wednesday and the Pew Research Center on Thursday.

There’s near consensus that the perpetrators of the violence on Jan. 6 should be held to account. About seven in 10 respondents to the Pew poll called it “very important” for them to be found and prosecuted, and the number saying it was at least “somewhat important” was closer to nine in 10.

But 54 percent of Republicans said that too much attention was being paid to Jan. 6, the poll found. And according to the Monmouth survey, two in every five Republicans said they considered the anger that led to the violence to have been at least partly justified.

Sixty-five percent of Republicans in that poll said that Mr. Biden had won the November election because of widespread fraud, and three in 10 said they would never accept him as their president.

When it comes to investigating the Capitol attack and prosecuting those responsible, there’s broad appetite for federal action. But bipartisan consensus breaks down over what a federal commission ought to be investigating.

Monmouth found that more than three in four Republicans agreed with a vast majority of Democrats that the Capitol Police’s failures to prepare for Jan. 6 deserved to be investigated, suggesting a possible area of politically convenient common ground. And 70 percent of Republicans said it would make sense for a commission to look into the growth in militant groups across the country (though the question notably did not specify the political persuasions of those groups).

But when it comes to the role of white nationalism — which many experts have called a motivating factor for the rioters — 45 percent of Republicans said they were against having a commission look into its role in inciting the violence.

In a separate question on the Monmouth poll, about six in 10 Republicans said white nationalism wasn’t a problem in the country.

The Pew poll found that Americans were now considerably more concerned about political violence in the country than about violent extremism in the name of Islam.

But there was no consensus about where the threat is really coming from: Respondents were as likely to say left-wing extremism was a worrisome threat as they were to say extremism on the right was. A slim majority called each one a major problem, and another one in three people said it was a minor problem. Only about three in 10 Republicans said right-wing extremism represented a major problem, roughly the same share as Democrats who said so about left-wing extremists.

30 percent of the country, including 41 percent of Republicans, doesn’t want the vaccine.

But a new survey indicates that a sizable minority of Americans — particularly Republicans — are not yet willing to take it.

Twenty-two percent of respondents to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released Thursday said they had already been vaccinated, and an additional 45 percent said they would get the vaccine when it became available to them.

But 30 percent said that they would not. Among Republicans, that number leapt to 41 percent.

The poll revealed a stark racial disparity in terms of access to the vaccine. Roughly a quarter of both white and Black Americans said they had already been vaccinated — but among Latinos, that number dropped to 11 percent.

The results also flew in the face of a commonly circulated narrative suggesting that Black people are less willing to be vaccinated than others. In fact, while 25 percent of Black people said they did not want the vaccine, that number was 28 percent among white people, driven largely by Republicans’ ambivalence. Among Latinos, it reached 37 percent.

Fifty-two percent of Latinos and 48 percent of Black people said they hadn’t yet gotten the vaccine but would take it when it became available to them. Just 43 percent of white people said that.

All told, the share of Americans saying they wouldn’t get the vaccine stood at 30 percent, down from a high of 44 percent in a Marist poll in September.

The recent Marist poll was conducted by phone from March 3 to March 8, among a random sample of 1,227 American adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

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Americans’ fears about getting Covid are easing. They also doubt vaccines will be doled out fairly.

Just 31 percent of respondents said they were very or extremely worried about the virus infecting them or a family member — the lowest number in any A.P./NORC poll since mid-March 2020. At the high point last year, half of Americans said they were highly worried.

Thirty-three percent of respondents in the most recent poll said they weren’t very worried about contracting the virus, and a further 36 percent described themselves as just somewhat concerned.

Approval of the federal government’s response to the pandemic has improved, too. Just 36 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the pandemic — the lowest number on record, and significantly down from last spring, when 48 percent gave the federal government a negative rating for its response.

Roughly seven in 10 said they would support requiring Americans to wear masks when they are around others in public. That’s slightly off the high of 75 percent, in December, but still roughly four times the number — 17 percent — who said they would oppose such a requirement.

For the first time in an A.P./NORC survey, a majority — 55 percent — said they or someone they knew closely had tested positive for Covid-19. One in five said that a close friend or relative had died from the virus. Two-thirds of respondents said they thought the American public had not taken the pandemic seriously enough.

When it comes to the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, 39 percent said they were highly confident the inoculations had been properly tested for safety and effectiveness. An additional 35 percent said they were somewhat confident.

Just 25 percent said they were highly confident that vaccines were being doled out fairly; 31 percent said they had little to no confidence on this front.

The poll was conducted from Feb. 25 to March 1 among 1,434 respondents to NORC’s AmeriSpeak Omnibus, a monthly survey that uses a probability-based panel representative of the American population. Most of the respondents were interviewed online, while a small number were contacted by phone.