A new Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris Poll survey released Friday shows that a whopping 62% of voters say that Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were president.
The partisan breakdown is even more striking: 85% of Republicans think Putin wouldn’t have invaded if Trump had been president and 38% of Democrats also believe it. Just 38% of American voters believe Putin would still have invaded if Trump were president.
A majority of Americans polled — 59 percent — also said they believed that the Russian president moved on Ukraine because Putin saw weakness in President Biden, while 41 percent said that it was not a factor in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
Biden’s overall approval rating dropped to a new low of 38% in the Harris poll. And only 17% said they “strongly approve” of Biden’s performance.
“On the eve of his State of the Union, the president has hit a new low as inflation and economic anxiety hit new highs. The president is now underwater on every top domestic and foreign policy issue,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey.
The same poll found that 64 percent of registered voters said Biden is “too lenient” with Russia, while 31 percent said he handles Russia “just right.” Five percent said he’s “too tough.”
Related: Wagging The Brandon: What the Heck Is Biden Doing?
The news is worse in the left-leaning Marist poll. Most Americans see Biden’s first year as a “failure.”
Majorities of Americans think Biden’s first year in office has been a failure (56%), he is not fulfilling campaign promises (54%), and he is doing more to divide the nation (52%) than to unite it. Americans are more than four times as likely to consider Biden’s first year to be a major failure (36%) than a major success (8%).
If that’s not bad enough news for Biden, he is failing catastrophically on lunch-pail issues.
Economic concerns hit close to home for Americans. 29% say their family finances have gotten worse in the last year. 23% say they have gotten better, and 48% say things are status quo.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden will speak to the country on the State of the Union. The universal pundit take is that he must “hit a home run” to save his presidency. That’s nonsense. The SOTU speech is only important to inside-the-beltway types and the national media.
What would be more effective for Biden would be to demonstrate that he’s a leader, not just a dismal echo of the far-left noise machine.
But that would take a kind of courage that the president has never shown in his nearly 50 years in politics.
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