While President Joe Biden’s poll numbers have been tanking for months now, fresh numbers on his handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be the most devastating of his presidency to date.
According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, Biden gets just 33% approval on the issue, while nearly 50% believe Biden has made America look weaker on a world stage:
A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 33 percent of Americans say they approve of the president’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine situation, while 47 percent say they disapprove and 20 percent say they have no opinion.Close to half of Americans polled — 48 percent — also said that they believed America’s leadership in the world had gotten weaker under Biden. Meanwhile, 23 percent said they believed it had gotten stronger and 26 percent said they believed it had stayed the same.
Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter did a deeper dive into the numbers and found that while Americans were sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight and did view Russia as the enemy, the “rally around the flag” effect did not extend to their feelings about Joe Biden:
Perhaps even more devastating for Biden will be finding out that former President Trump, who Biden has relentlessly demonized as an inept leader and a “danger to democracy,” actually gets better marks than Biden himself on this issue, with results from another poll revealing that a comfortable majority of Americans believe that if Trump was still president Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine. Further, most believe that the invasion happened because Russia’s president viewed Biden as weak:
A new Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)-Harris Poll survey released Friday found that 62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not be moving against Ukraine if Trump had been president. When looking strictly at the answers of Democrats and Republicans, 85 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats answered this way.However, 38 percent of all Americans polled believed that Putin would have invaded Ukraine even if Trump had been president.A majority of Americans polled — 59 percent — also said they believed that the Russian president moved on Ukraine because Putin saw weakness in President Biden, while 41 percent said that it was not a factor in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
Those numbers will also come as a big shock to prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and their apologists in the mainstream press, all of whom over the last couple of weeks have been trying to pin Biden’s failures on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Trump.
Putting these numbers in perspective, between this and Biden’s catastrophic handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, his inability to unite his own party let alone the country, and his ineffectiveness on being able to bring both parties together in Washington, D.C. to get things done, Biden has not delivered on three key campaign promises he made when he was running for president:
1) He’s not a uniter.
2) He’s not a nation-healer.
3) He way oversold his foreign policy cred, as evidenced by his handling of Afghanistan and the Russia/Ukraine conflict as well as by how many people in this country now view him as making the United States look feckless and weak internationally.
In the weeks ahead, expect to see clips and quotes like these get some major attention as Republicans seek to capitalize on Biden’s multitude of self-inflicted disasters headed not just into next Tuesday’s State of the Union address but also into the 2022 midterm elections:
Just a failure on so many levels. And to think we’re barely past the first year of his presidency.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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