Fifty days after being sworn into office, President Joe Biden is receiving high marks from a majority of the U.S. populace.
Polling from Pew Research Center shows that 54 percent of Americans approve of the way Biden has handled his job in the White House so far, with 42 percent disapproving.
The poll also gauged the public’s views of Biden on a number of issues, with a majority of Americans expressing confidence in his leadership on the economy (56 percent), immigration (53 percent) and foreign policy (56 percent).
Biden’s highest rating in the poll came on the issue of the coronavirus pandemic, with nearly two-thirds of the public (65 percent) approving of his related actions.
But voters are still skeptical about one key promise Biden made on the campaign trail last year: His ability to close partisan divides in the U.S. On that topic, only 48 percent of Americans said they were confident in his leadership, with a 52-percent majority saying they didn’t have confidence in his ability to follow through on it.
The polling from Pew matches other polls on Biden’s first 50 days in office. According to a recent aggregate of polls collected and analyzed by FiveThirtyEight.com, Biden is averaging a 53 percent approval among voters, with around 40 percent disapproving of his performance so far.
Biden’s approval numbers, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate, have not shifted much since he took office, when he also averaged around 53 percent. The president’s disapproval numbers, however, are slightly higher from when he took office on January 20, when the aggregate of polling showed only 36 percent disapproved of him.
Biden’s first 50 days in office were capped off with his signing of a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which is aimed at curtailing the negative economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. By signing the bill into law on Thursday, the White House said, Americans could expect to see $1,400 stimulus payments as early as this weekend.
Biden plans to give an address to the nation, his first since taking office, on Thursday evening, the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic. As of this week, nearly 30 million cases of COVID-19 have been identified, with more than 529,000 Americans having lost their lives to the virus so far.
The positive polling numbers that Biden is currently seeing are far higher than numbers that his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, saw within his own first 50 days in the White House, back in 2017. Polling for Trump at the start of March of that year showed 41 percent of the country approving of his work while 49 percent of Americans disapproved.
