A majority of Americans do not believe outgoing President Joe Biden’s term will be remembered fondly when it is all said and done.
A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 54 percent of Americans believe Biden’s presidency will be remembered either as “below average” or “poorly,” with a 37 percent plurality rating Biden’s time in office as “poor.”
Another 26 percent of Americans think Biden’s tenure will be given an “average” grade and 19 percent believe it will be either “above average” or outstanding, the survey found. Biden’s net positive score of negative 35 puts him at the second-lowest level behind all nine recent presidents except for Richard Nixon, best known for resigning in disgrace over 50 years ago because of the Watergate scandal.
Those perceptions mirror the consistently poor approval rating Biden has received throughout his presidency beginning around the time the U.S. mismanaged its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
Republicans gave Biden particularly harsh reviews, with 76 percent responding that Biden will be evaluated poorly and 17 percent giving him a below average grade. Independents also judged Biden negatively, as 51 percent said he would be considered either below average or poor by future historians.
A plurality of Democrats, 44 percent, think Biden’s presidency will be seen as outstanding or above average and 38 percent expect his stint in the Oval Office to be thought of as average. Democratic respondents’s 28 point favorability toward Biden is significantly lower than the marks given to other former Democratic presidents such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Republican attitudes toward how Biden will be remembered were also much more critical than they were for Obama, Clinton, and other Democratic officeholders. Biden’s negative 92 net positive rating among Republicans is much lower than Obama’s negative 48 and Clinton’s negative 38 respectively.
Likewise, Democrats rated Trump the most negatively, giving him a negative 79 net positive rating as 85 percent of them said Trump would be remembered as poor or below average. Those responses applied only to Trump’s first term. The president-elect’s second term is set to begin in less than two weeks.
Overall, the perception of Trump’s first term improved noticeably from when it ended in January 2021. Trump’s negative 4 rating in Gallup’s latest poll is much higher than the negative 32 figure he had four years ago, largely thanks to increased favorability among Republicans and independents.
Gallup conducted the poll from December 2-18 with a sample of 1,003 American adults living nationwide. The margin of error of the survey is plus or minus four percentage points. It was recorded prior to the passing of 100-year-old former president Jimmy Carter in late December, whose turbulent term was frequently compared to Biden’s.