Americans are getting ready to be done with COVID-19, and they’re not happy with the Biden administration’s behavior during the pandemic, per a new poll.
SO WHAT
The state of the union is pissed off ahead of President Joe Biden’s Tuesday address.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
SCREW COVID: The Axios-Ipsos poll, released Tuesday, found 73% of Americans want to start returning to the pre-coronavirus normal — if not throw off all restrictions immediately.
- That’s up 21 points from Axios’ last survey, in early February.
- Just 40% of Americans say returning to their normal lives is risky, a 16-point drop from February and the lowest share since July.
SCREW BIDEN: At the same time, Americans overwhelmingly think Biden failed to deliver on his core campaign promise to “shut down the virus, not the country,” according to the poll.
Biden is underwater on every pandemic-related issue the pollsters asked about other than vaccine development and distribution.
- Only 43% of respondents said they now trust what Biden tells them about the pandemic.
- The president “wasn’t able to resolve the most important thing to [Americans], which was a return to normalcy,” Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs, told Axios. “It happened way after we thought it was going to happen.”
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE DEMOCRATS
Biden wants to tout the waning of COVID-19 and the rebounding economy as a victory in his State of the Union address to Congress, but he’s afraid of prematurely declaring victory again, Politico reported.
- With his approval ratings in the gutter, the GOP plans to hit Biden and the Democrats over pandemic disappointments, high inflation, rising violent crime and his “weak” foreign policy.
- Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, giving the Republican response, is expected to focus on the toll school closures have taken on kids.
SAME ENERGY
In January, at the height of the omicron coronavirus wave, more than half of parents say their children missed several days of school, and 25% say it was more than a week, according to a New York Times-Dynamic poll released last week.
- Damning internal Democratic polling, published last month, found 57% of voters in swing districts agreed with the statement, “Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response.”