Less than a week left President Biden As his White House term winds down, a new national poll shows that many Americans don’t think history will be kind to him.
According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Tuesday, 44% of voters nationwide say history will judge Biden as a failed president, while another 27% say he will be judged a fair president.
Twenty-one percent of those surveyed said history will see Biden as a good president, while only 5% say he will be considered a great president.
The president’s unique term in the White House ends next Monday, January 20, as President-elect Donald Trump was inaugurated as Biden’s successor.
MOST AMERICANS SAY THIS IS HOW THEY WILL SEE BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY
President Biden looks on as he addresses the jobs and economic report from the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC on January 10, 2025. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
However, according to the poll, 44% also say Trump will be seen in history as a failed president.
One in five say they would consider Trump, who begins his second term next week, to be a great president, 19% say he is good, and 27% say they would rate him as a fair president.
Trump ended his first term with negative approval ratings, including a 47% approval rating in the Fox News poll from four years ago.
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But opinions about Trump’s first term have risen in polls conducted since his landslide victory in November’s presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris. The vice president succeeded Biden in July as the Democratic standard-bearer in 2024 after the president dropped out of the race following a disastrous debate against Trump.
According to a USA Today/Suffolk poll, 52% of respondents say they approve of the job Trump has done during his first term, while 45% disapprove.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks to members of the media during a press conference at the Mar-a-Lago Club on January 7, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Suffolk University Center for Political Research Director David Paleologos noted that the change over the past four years is particularly significant among independent voters.
“Donald Trump essentially erased his huge negative personal popularity between December 2020 and today among independents,” Paleologos said. “Trump went from a massive minus 22 (35% favorable ‒ 57% unfavorable) to a negligible minus 5 (42% favorable ‒ 47% unfavorable)” among the group that usually swings elections.
AS BIDEN SAID IN THE LATEST NATIONAL FOX NEWS SURVEY
Looking ahead, 31% said they were excited to have Trump back in the White House, while 18% said they were pleased. However, 12% said they were depressed and 31% feared another Trump presidency.
President Biden speaks at a reception for new Democratic members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House, Sunday, January 5, 2025, in Washington, DC (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Cenet)
According to the poll, 43% say they approve of the job Biden has done as president after he leaves office, while 54% disapprove.
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 began to slide in August 2021 after Biden’s much-criticized behavior in the turbulent the exit of the USA from Afghanistan and after a spike in COVID-19 cases that summer, mostly among unvaccinated people.
The decline in the president’s approval rating has also been fueled by soaring inflation — which began rising in the summer of 2021 and remains Americans’ top pocketbook concern to this day — and a wave of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. along southern border with Mexico.
Biden’s approval rating slipped in the fall of 2021 and never returned to positive territory.
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According to USA Today/Suffolk University poll, nearly a quarter of respondents were undecided when asked to name Biden’s greatest accomplishment as president. Nineteen percent mentioned investment 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 surrender on immigration, and 20% offered a chaotic withdrawal of US military forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
In the poll, 1,000 registered voters across the country were questioned by telephone. It was conducted from January 7 to January 1 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
