What are the lowest approval ratings of recent US presidents? Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush…

President Biden’s approval rating is hovering under forty-percent, raising concerns over how the numbers will impact the performance of Democrats this fall. FiveThirtyEight has tracked President Biden’s approval rating at 38.4 percent, just under the level of support for Donald Trump had when he left office.

Donald Trump has yet to announce his candidacy but if reports are correct, and he does plan to run again, we could see the two face off again in 2024. Many Republicans running across the country have incorporated the idea that 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, only fifteen percent of voters said that this would make them more likely to vote for a candidate. More than third of respondents said that this would have no impact on their decision to vote for a candidate, which is a bit shocking.

It could be that the approval rating of the president is falling because of the high levels of economic uncertainty. The same Quinnipiac poll found that only thirty-six percent of respondents believed that the president had a lot of power to control inflation. Interestingly sixty-five percent of Republicans were on this opinion, whereas only ten percent of Democrats agreed that the president has the power to lower prices.

A different question…

It is important to note that low approval does not necessarily equal poor electoral performance.

Just because someone does not approve of the job a leader is doing does not mean that they would not vote for them. The conversation on polling tends to conflate these two types of questions.

Congress after all, has an approval rating of just sixteen percent, yet ninety-three percent of Congressional incumbents were reelected in 2020. Does this mean that voters approve of their own Congressperson, but dislike others? No, not necessarily. It could be that people vote based on the options they have and that because special interests and dark money groups have such an outsized influence in electing certain candidates, Congress does not always act to support the needs of the people.

Similarly, with regard to the president --a low approval rating for Joe Biden now does not mean that voters won’t turn out in 2024…should he chose to run again.

Approval ratings of past presidents

Donald Trump

When former-President Trump left office, his disapproval rate stood at fifty-seven percent, with 38.6 percent of the public supporting him. The highest approval rating Trump had while in office was in April 2020 which could relate to his handling of the pandemic in its earliest phase. In April, Congress passed the CARES Act which distributed the first round of stimulus checks and bolstered unemployment benefits for the more than twenty-million workers who lost their jobs.

However, a few short months later, Donald Trump’s approval rating took a nose dive to its lowest point in his presidency as he left office --in part as a result of the events on January 6th.

Barack Obama

When former-president Obama was elected, he entered office with a historic approval rating of sixty-four percent. However, with the impacts of the financial crisis led this level of support to began to fall. Aside from a few peaks in popularity, the majority of Obama’s term, the disapproval rate was above fifty percent. However, unlike Donald Trump, he left office with a net positive approval rate.

George W. Bush

George W. Bush, the first president to be elected in the twenty first century did so by losing the popular vote but winning electoral college. This impacted his approval rating when he entered the White House as some were not so convinced by the legitimacy of his election. Bush began his first term with an approval rating of forty-six percent. However, after the 9/11 attacks, his approval rate skyrocketed to over eighty percent. These numbers gave him quite a cushion for his remaining years in office. However after the economic crisis his approval rating did fall under fifty percent, only to increase slightly before leaving office.