After many weeks of chaos and tragedy in Afghanistan, Joe Biden’s approval rating last week hit the lowest it’s ever been since taking office in January.
A poll released from NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist shows Biden at a shocking 43 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval. This is a jolting downturn from the poll released just a few weeks earlier which gave Biden an average approval of just under 50 percent.
Even among Democrats, his approval has fallen to just 85 percent within the party. Biden’s main loss of support is with Independents, who indicated just 36 percent approval. This is a pivotal change for where Biden stands with Independent voters since he had previously gained tremendous ground with them in the 2020 election.
This sudden drop in approval isn’t surprising amid rising inflation, increasing gas prices, and more importantly, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Over the past week, Biden has neglected hundreds of Americans still stranded in Afghanistan under Taliban control. An ISIS-K suicide bombing targeting Americans during the troop withdrawal left 13 U.S. service members dead and 18 wounded. And when Biden compared his son’s death from brain cancer to being killed in action, the Gold Star families of those 13 troops members were not impressed, to say the least.
Despite his failure, Biden has continually pointed to the withdrawal as “successful,” yet claiming that it was Trump’s fault in the same speech.
Alongside the Afghanistan crisis, inflation is on the rise in the United States and the economy is stagnant. The August jobs report came out with an underwhelming 235,000 jobs compared to the expected 720,000. This leads economists to believe that the massive stimulus spending that the Federal Reserve has been pumping out, might not come to an end just yet. Joe Biden credits the Delta variant of Covid-19 to the disappointing jobs record this month.
Biden explained during a press briefing that he believes “we’re not where we need to be in our economic recovery.” There’s no doubt this plunge will be an uphill climb for the Biden administration to recover approval from the American people.
