President Joe Biden will go into Tuesday night’s State of the Union address with poor ratings on his management of the pandemic.
Over 6 in 10 voters believe Biden has done a poor job of jump-starting the economy and supporting small businesses, while only 40% say he has adequately supported workers over the past year, according to a new Axios-Ipsos poll. Biden is underwater on a number of other aspects relating to the pandemic, such as helping people protect themselves from the virus.
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The polling reflects a drop in faith in Biden to fulfill his central campaign pledge to drive the country out of the pandemic and return the United States to a sense of normalcy as he prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address as president.
“So in a relative sense, his central pillar is really fragile,” Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs President Cliff Young told Axios.
The omicron wave is subsiding, while about 69% of people ages 5 and up have been fully vaccinated and only one age group — children under 5 — remains ineligible for vaccination.
The administration has only recently begun loosening its recommendations for universal mask-wearing as cases and hospitalizations due to the omicron variant continue to fall. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week revised its guidance and benchmarks to say it is safe for most people to stop wearing masks in indoor public places, something most governors had already been telling people.
The administration fell under scrutiny for apparently falling behind Democratic governors who began lifting their mask mandates in phases a few weeks ago. Many Republican governors declined to mandate masks even before the omicron wave hit and then subsided, arguing that such requirements were not helpful. The majority of the public — 57% — said Biden was doing a fair or poor job of communicating clearly with people about the state of the pandemic.
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The State of the Union will be an opportunity for Biden to draw on increasing public optimism that the worst of the pandemic is over. There is widespread public support for the acceptance of the coronavirus as a new facet of normal life. For instance, 70% of people surveyed by Monmouth University pollsters last month agreed with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”
Biden’s domestic agenda was largely put on hold late last year with the failure of his trademark Build Back Better bill. But with COVID-19 downgraded to a lesser threat, Biden will have more bandwidth to push for prescription drug pricing reform, an issue that will be sandwiched between an array of remarks about the economy at large in his speech.
