More than half of Americans say so President Biden will be remembered as either below average or one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history, according to a new national poll.
Just over a third of adults nationwide surveyed in a Marist poll released Wednesday said Biden would be remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history, while another 19% said he would be considered a below-average president.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents said Biden’s legacy would be considered average, and 19% said he would be considered above average or one of the best presidents in the nation’s history.
The poll was released just hours before the president delivers his farewell address to the nation, with just days left before the end of Biden’s term and his legacy President-elect Trump in the White House.
WILL HISTORY BE KIND OR UNKIND TO PRESIDENT BIDEN?
With less than a week left in his term, President Biden addresses the State Department in Washington, DC on January 13, 2025. (AP)
In his Oval Office speech, Biden will likely seek to cement his legacy as a president who sought to stabilize politics at home while strengthening American leadership abroad, and as a leader who led the nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic and made historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy.
Marist survey is the second consecutive national poll showing that history is unlikely to look favorably on Biden.
According to a USA Today/Suffolk University research released Tuesday, 44% of voters nationwide said history would judge Biden as a failed president, while another 27% said he would be judged an honest president.
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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 tenure in the White House ends next Monday, January 20, when Trump is inaugurated as Biden’s successor.
However, according to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 44% also said Trump will be seen in history as a failed president.
President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida on January 7, 2025. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
One in five said they would consider Trump an excellent president, 19% would say he was good, and 27% said 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.
In a Marist poll four years ago, when Trump finished his first term, 47% thought he would be remembered as one of the nation’s worst presidents.
MOST AMERICANS SAY THIS IS HOW THEY WILL SEE BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY
Biden has 42% approval and 50% disapproval in Marist’s new poll as the president leaves the White House. He had a 43%-54% approval/disapproval rating in a USA Today/Suffolk University poll.
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 US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and after a spike in COVID-19 cases that summer that was mostly among unvaccinated people.
The decline in the president’s approval rating has also been fueled by skyrocketing 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.
Biden’s approval rating slipped in the fall of 2021 and never returned to positive territory.
President Biden, right, meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
As Trump prepares to retake the presidency, a Marist poll shows opinions of him remain low, with 44% of Americans viewing him favorably and 49% having an unfavorable view of the incoming president.
But opinions of Trump’s first term have risen in a number of polls 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.
The poll also shows that Americans have high expectations of Trump when it comes to the economy.
“While many Americans feel that the current economy is not doing well for them, residents nationally have become more optimistic about the future of their finances,” the poll notes.
The survey also shows that Americans are divided over Trump’s proposed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
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According to the poll, more than six in ten disapprove of Trump’s promise to pardon supporters convicted in the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol.
The Marist poll was conducted from January 7 to 9, and surveyed 1,387 adults across the country. The overall sampling error of the survey is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
