Biden’s Opening Approval Rating Below That of Trump and Obama: Poll

Biden’s Opening Approval Rating Below That of Trump and Obama: Poll
President Joe Biden walks the abbreviated parade route after Biden's inauguration on January 20, 2021 in Washington. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
Bowen Xiao
1/22/2021
Updated:
1/22/2021

President Joe Biden’s opening approval rating on Friday came in below the ratings of his two predecessors when they had just started their presidency, according to a new poll by Rasmussen.

The Jan. 22 poll showed that 48 percent of likely U.S. voters approved of Biden’s job performance, while 45 percent disapproved. Rasmussen is the only national pollster tracking the presidential approval rating on a daily basis.

Going deeper, 36 percent strongly approved of the job Biden was doing, and 38 percent strongly disapproved, according to Rasmussen. The polling company’s daily tracking results are conduced by telephone surveys of 500 likely voters each night and reported on a three-day rolling average.

When President Donald Trump started his term on Jan. 20, 2017, his approval rating was at 56 percent, according to an archive of Rasmussen’s previous daily polling history. On that day, 44 percent disapproved of the job Trump was doing.
And when former President Barack Obama’s daily approval rating was tracked on Jan, 20, 2009, Rasmussen reported a 67 percent approval rating, according to their archives. On that day, 32 percent disapproved of the job Obama was doing.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that the new administration took several steps in the wrong direction on Biden’s first day in office.

“The president re-entered the failed Paris climate agreement—a terrible bargain that would set us up to self-inflict major economic pain on working American families with no assurance that China or Russia would honor their commitments. In fact, the U.S. has already been reducing carbon emissions while China and other nations in the agreement have kept increasing theirs. Rejoining will just set us up to kill American jobs while our competitors continue to roar on by,” McConnell said on the Senate floor in Washington.

“The President also unilaterally cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline,“ he added. ”The day-one priority was to kill thousands of American jobs including union jobs, disappoint our strong ally Canada, and reverse some of our progress toward energy security. This is a project that the liberal Canadian government and Prime Minister Trudeau support. An investment in North American energy. Even the Obama State Department concluded it would not harm the climate. But because canceling a pipeline project just feels like the green thing to do, the new administration killed these jobs.”

Senate majority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, touted Biden’s moves as accomplishments and praised his national strategy to combat the pandemic.
Bowen Xiao was a New York-based reporter at The Epoch Times. He covers national security, human trafficking and U.S. politics.
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