1 Year After the Election, How Biden’s Popularity Stacks Up Against

A year after the Presidential election, President Joe Biden remains more popular than former President Donald Trump, but only by a small margin.

Biden entered office with significantly higher ratings than Trump, but the president has faced drops in popularity toward the end of his first year in office. Predominantly being fueled by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Trump has taken advantage of the problems plaguing the Biden administration to boost support for Republicans and boast about his time in office.

Recent polls put Trump’s and Biden’s favorability ratings within 2 to 4 percentage points of each other, although Biden’s regularly had the higher of the two. An NBC News poll released on Sunday found 40 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed had a positive view of Biden and 38 percent had a positive view of Trump.

That same two-point gap was found in a Morning Consult poll released days earlier, although it showed voters had a more positive view of the two men, giving Biden a 46 percent favorability rating and Trump a 44 percent favorability rating.

Biden and Trump had nearly equal support from members of their own party and negative views from members of the opposite party. Trump’s supporters had a slightly more positive view of him than Biden’s voters did of the president and independents were nearly evenly split, going for Biden by two points.

While some thought Trump being kicked off social media would force the former president into the background, he’s kept up a continual presence by way of rallies and emailed statements. The bulk of those statements involve criticism of the Biden administration, which Trump sees as dismantling the progress his administration made.

It’s unlikely that Trump’s statements are going to persuade Democrats to vote for Republicans in the midterms or a Republican president in 2024, but Biden’s falling appeal is raising concerns that the GOP could take back Congress in 2022. History bodes well for Republicans in 2022, as the president’s party often loses seats in the midterms, and they only need to flip six seats in the House and one seat in the Senate.

With midterms being a referendum on the president, Biden’s low polling numbers among independents could make all the difference in close elections.

A YouGov poll from the end of October still showed Biden and Trump had similar favorability ratings but gave Biden a greater margin of four points. The YouGov poll also found Democrats viewed Biden more positively than Republicans viewed Trump, although each…