Biden heads into State of the Union as 60 per cent of Americans say he hasn’t kept his promises

Some worry Democrats face bruising midterms if Biden’s popularity doesn’t increase

President Joe Biden is set to give his second State of the Union address to the nation on Tuesday amid an approval rating slump that has persisted since the fall and uncertainty in the weeks ahead regarding how his handling of the crisis in Ukraine will affect his popularity.

Mr Biden’s speech on Tuesday comes as a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released just yesterday found that 61 per cent of Americans say Mr Biden has only kept “some” of his campaign promises - or kept none at all.

Other polling has been equally vicious to Mr Biden; the president has seen his approval rating hover in the low 40s for months. In one poll of voters in Utah published this week, it’s below 30 per cent.

The president is eager to turn this slump around but in short supply of ways to do it. The crisis in Ukraine has provided a needed political respite for Mr Biden as lawmakers on Capitol Hill have largely gotten behind his vision for a multi-nation response to Vladimir Putin, but there’s little evidence to say such an issue would be at the top of voters’ minds when they hit the ballot box in November.

One issue for Mr Biden is that the polling itself is one of the problems: The president ran for office on the theory that he could unite America after four years of Donald Trump and bridge the massive divide that political polarisation has created in our society. That hasn’t happened, in no small part due to Mr Trump’s insistence that Mr Biden stole the 2020 election and the strong sway he still holds over most voters in the GOP.

The US president’s speech tonight will be revelatory therefore as it will both touch on the crisis in Ukraine as well as issues that Mr Biden believes will be political winners for his party over the next eight months.

Among the topics likely to be addressed is Mr Biden’s ongoing management of the Covid-19 crisis, which like other issues has been one where the president’s popularity has fallen but remains one of the chief reasons he defeated Donald Trump in 2020. In an Axios poll published this week, Mr Biden is now flagging on issues of trust relating to whether he has stood up for American workers during the pandemic and provided clear information to the American public, while a majority still trusts the administration to handle the development and distribution of more Covid-19 vaccines.

Democrats are making a clear effort to show a public heel-turn on that issue and as a result Covid-19 restrictions and mandates are fast disappearing or being relaxed in major cities like Washington DC and New York. Anger and frustration about Covid-19 and its related effects on public life is rampant around the US but particularly among conservatives, who have publicly hoped for Canada-style “trucker convoys” to descend upon DC even as that city and much of the US is now firmly on the path away from such restrictions.

Cliff Roberts, head of polling firm Ipsos, told Axios in an interview that much of the anger independents and conservatives who were willing to pull the lever for Mr Biden feel is a result of his failure to oversee the return to normalcy fast enough. The president “wasn’t able to resolve the most important thing to them, which was a return to normalcy”, he told the news outlet.

The White House has remained adamant that the administration is following the science on Covid-19 and issuing CDC guideline changes as health experts say they can be changed, and not before.

“[A]s the federal government, we have the responsibility to rely on data, on science, on the medical experts. That’s something the President committed to during the campaign,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last month.