Only one in five polled think the president has honored his campaign trail promises of unity
Joe Biden speaks at the signing ceremony for a spending bill at the White House in Washington, DC, September 13, 2022 © AP / Andrew Harnik
Some 58.7% of American voters believe that US President Joe Biden has divided, rather than unified, the country during his time in office, a new poll has found. The results come as Biden battles low approval ratings and after he accused his political opponents of threatening “democracy” itself.
Commissioned by the Convention of States and released on Wednesday, the poll found that 58.7% of Americans believe that Biden has divided the US, while 20.6% think he’s unified it. Another 20.7% aren’t sure.
While 43.6% of Democrats believe that Biden has made good on his campaign promise to be “a president for all Americans,” 92.8% of Republicans think he has divided the country, as do 64.1% of independents, according to Breitbart, which first obtained the results of the poll.
A separate Trafalgar poll released on Monday put Biden’s approval at 39.3%, with 54.8% disapproving. Although the US president’s ratings vary from poll to poll, they have consistently fallen over the last year. A Yahoo News and YouGov survey taken earlier this month found that more than 60% of Americans, including nearly half of Democrats, feel that the US is “on the wrong track.”
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When asked about Biden’s performance, the majority of respondents stated they disapproved of how he is handling the key issues, such as the economy, race relations, guns, crime, climate change, abortion and healthcare-related matters.
Against this background, Biden delivered a highly controversial speech in Philadelphia at the beginning of the month, in which he declared that former President “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
A week earlier, Biden likened his predecessor’s worldview to “semi-fascism,” arguing that Trump supporters “refuse to accept the will of the people,” “embrace political violence” and pose a “threat to our very democracy.”
Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said that Biden’s speech showed his “divisiveness, disgust, and hostility towards half the country,” while Trafalgar found that 56.8% of voters viewed it as meant “to incite conflict amongst Americans.”
