Americans confident Joe Biden can handle Covid-19 pandemic, doubt he will unify country

As President Joe Biden takes a victory lap after signing his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, he continues to enjoy widespread confidence in his handling of the pandemic, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday.

Almost two-thirds of Americans expressed confidence in Biden’s ability to confront the health crisis, including one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. An even higher share — 70% of all Americans — expressed a favourable view of the relief package, according to another set of results from the same survey released earlier this week.

That lines up with the results of a CNN poll, also released Thursday, that found that 67% of the country had confidence in Biden’s ability to guide the country out of the pandemic.

Biden’s overall job approval rating sits firmly in positive territory, with 54% giving him positive marks and 42% disapproving, the Pew survey found. But he continues to face a stubborn partisan divide: Among Republicans and Republican leaners, just 16% expressed approval.

By comparison, at a similar moment in President Barack Obama’s first term, Pew found that 37% of Republicans and Republican leaners gave him positive marks. For Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the number was 30% among those in the opposing party.

So while Biden enjoys broad public confidence in his ability to handle the pandemic, and while a solid majority of the country told Pew researchers that they trusted him to make sound decisions on foreign policy and the economy, there is less faith in his ability to bring the country together, although it was a key component of his campaign.

Forty-eight per cent of Americans said they felt good about his chances of uniting the country, while 52% said they didn’t have a lot of confidence, according to Pew.

The poll found more evidence of the entrenched divide: The Democratic Party was slightly more popular than the Republican Party, with 47% of Americans expressing a positive view of it — compared with 38% for the GOP — but about 3 in 5 Americans described both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as “too extreme in its positions.”

The poll was conducted March 1-7, and reached 12,055 respondents via Pew’s American Trends Panel, which uses a probability-based model to draw a sample that is representative of the national population.