With less than a week left until President Biden’s tenure in the White House sunsets, a new national poll indicates many Americans do not think history will be kind to him.
According to a USA Today/Suffolk University survey released on Tuesday, 44% of voters nationwide say history will assess Biden as a failed president, with another 27% saying he will be judged as a fair president.
Twenty-one percent of those questioned said history will view Biden as a good president, with only 5% saying he will be seen as a great president.
The president’s single term in the White House ends next Monday, Jan. 20, as President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated as Biden’s successor.
However, according to the poll, 44% also say that Trump will be seen by history as a failed president.
One in five say that Trump, who begins his second term next week, will be viewed as a great president, with 19% saying good and 27% saying he would be judged a fair president.
Trump ended his first term in office with approval ratings in negative territory, including 47% approval in Fox News polling from four years ago.
However, opinions about Trump’s first term have risen in polling conducted since his convincing victory in November’s presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris. The vice president succeeded Biden in July as the Democrats’ 2024 standard-bearer after the president dropped out of the race following a disastrous debate performance against Trump.
According to the USA Today/Suffolk poll, 52% of those surveyed say they approve of the job Trump did during his first term in office, with 45% giving him a thumbs down.
Suffolk University Political Research Center director David Paleologos noted that the change over the past four years was particularly significant among independent voters.
‘Donald Trump essentially wiped out his overwhelming negative personal popularity between December 2020 and today among independents,’ Paleologos said. ‘Trump went from a whopping minus 22 (35% favorable ‒ 57% unfavorable) to a negligible minus 5 (42% favorable ‒ 47% unfavorable)’ among the group that typically swings elections.
Looking ahead, 31% said they were excited Trump was returning to the White House, with 18% saying they were satisfied. However, 12% said they were depressed and 31% are afraid of a second Trump presidency.
According to the poll, 43% say they approve of the job Biden’s done as president as he leaves office, with 54% disapproving.
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.
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’s approval ratings slipped underwater in the autumn of 2021 and never reemerged into positive territory.
According to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, nearly a quarter of respondents were undecided when asked to name Biden’s biggest achievement as president. Nineteen percent said investing in infrastructure. Ten percent said fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the top health and economic concern among Americans when Biden took office four years ago.
As for his biggest failure as president, just over three in ten pointed to Biden’s handing of immigration, with 20% offering the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
The poll questioned 1,000 registered voters nationwide by phone. It was conducted Jan. 7-1, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.