Tipsheet

These Poll Results About the Afghanistan Withdrawal Are Pretty Terrible for Biden

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  August 27, 2021 3:30 PM

The scenes out of Afghanistan have been heart-wrenching to watch, even before the deadly terror attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport Thursday that reportedly killed more than 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members. President’s Biden’s handling of the crisis has only made matters worse and tarnished the U.S.’s image worldwide. 

Now, a new survey shows a supermajority of Americans say the operation to evacuate Americans and allies from the country has been poorly handled. 

According to a YouGov survey, more than two-thirds of Americans, 68 percent, say the evacuation effort has been handled “badly.” Eighty-four percent of Republicans said the Afghanistan evacuation was handled “very or somewhat badly,” while a majority of Democrats, 55 percent, agreed, as did 76 percent of Independents.

Of those who said the evacuation was handled poorly, two-thirds placed the blame squarely on Biden. 

Disapproval of the way the commander in chief is handling the Afghanistan withdrawal increased 9 percentage points from last week, from 42 percent to 51 percent. His overall approval rating “remains fairly stable,” YouGov's survey shows. 

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According to FiveThirtyEight, however, over the last few weeks Biden's "job approval rating has dropped precipitously while his disapproval rating has risen sharply amid concerns surrounding the delta variant of the coronavirus, the associated economic fallout from the pandemic and the ongoing withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan." 

A month ago, his approval rating stood at 52.7 percent and his disapproval rating sat at 42.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, for a net approval rating of +10.0 percentage points. But as of Thursday,1 his approval rating stood at 47.1 percent and his disapproval rating at 47.0 percent, for a net approval rating of +0.1 points. 

In an era of deep political polarization where we rarely see big shifts in public opinion of presidents, this counts as a pretty big swing. (FiveThirtyEight)