President Joe Biden holds the lowest January approval rating in an election year during the modern era of polling, a CNN poll found this week, underscoring the president’s deep unpopularity.
Biden’s low popularity stands at 38 percent, five points below former President Trump in January 2020 and nine points worse than former President Obama at the same point in his tenure:
- Eisenhower, 1956 — 77 percent
- Johnson, 1964 — 76 percent
- Carter, 1980 — 58 percent
- Reagan, 1984 — 55 percent
- Truman, 1948 — 53 percent
- Clinton, 1996 — 52 percent
- Bush, 2004 — 49 percent
- Nixon, 1972 — 49 percent
- Obama, 2012 — 47 percent
- Bush, 1992 — 47 percent
- Ford, 1976 — 45 percent
- Trump, 2020 — 43 percent
- Biden, 2024 — 38 percent
The poll sampled 1,212 adults from January 25-30 and has a 3.8-point margin of error.
The survey is the latest in historically bad polling for the president.
In December, FiveThirtyEight also showed that Biden is the least popular president in modern U.S. history, finding that his approval rating is -18 percentage points, besting Trump by about six points:
- 37.7 percent approve of Biden
- 55.6 percent disapprove of Biden
In January, FiveThirtyEight found that Biden held the worst net approval rating in history at that time in office: 1,080 days into his tenure. The following is the net approval rating of previous presidents in the modern era at the same time in their presidencies:
- Biden: -17.2 points
- Trump: -11.8 points
- Obama: -0.6 points
- Carter: +9.6 points
- Clinton: +11.2 points
- H.W. Bush: +12.5 points
- Nixon: +14.6 points
- Reagan: +15.3 points
- Truman: +16.7 points
- G.W. Bush: +20.3 points
- Eisenhower: +62.6 points
