A new survey shows that President Joe Biden’s performance on COVID-19 has created a growing trust deficit.
Biden came into office with 58 percent of those surveyed saying they trusted him to provide accurate information about coronavirus, according to an Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll.
That has now tumbled to 42 percent in the most recent survey, taken Friday through Monday — a 16-point drop.
Axios-Ipsos poll: Biden is losing trust on COVID https://t.co/tkAzDC8dB6
— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) October 12, 2021
Also striking is the number of respondents saying that have no trust at all in what Biden says on the subject of the virus.
When he came into office that was at 25 percent. Now, it is at 40 percent.
Overall, 56 percent of respondents to the latest poll said they have little to no trust in Biden on the subject of the virus.
The online survey of 1,015 general population adults has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.0-3.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while more respected than the current president, is not immune to the erosion of trust shown toward Biden.
The overall level of trust in the CDC has dropped from 74 percent in December, when Donald Trump was president, to 63 percent now.
Trust in what the survey labeled “national health officials” has also declined to 58 percent, the lowest point since the survey commended last July.
“He won on COVID, he surfed the first six months on COVID, but he’s being challenged by it now because there’s not a clear resolution in sight,” Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. public affairs, said of Biden, according to Axios.
“He’s basically losing the expectations game,” Young said. “Once the Delta variant raised its ugly head, it affected people’s lives, and now they’re adjusting their expectations, which is not good for him.”
“His central pillar … is his ability to bring to a resolution the pandemic and the COVID issue. He’s in a very difficult place.”
Chris Jackson, Ipsos pollster and senior vice president, said, “In the absence of a villain, Democrats are kind of turning on the president because they don’t know who else to blame. A lot of the people who are his supporters still feel very anxious about COVID.”
“He’s lost a ton of ground with that group that thought they were going to be able to get back to their lives within the next six months,” Jackson said.
Biden promised change that has not taken place, one analyst noted.
“There is a malaise,” said Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist, according to Politico. “People don’t feel like their lives have been improved. They did sort of feel that promises aren’t being kept.”
Biden and congressional Democrats “are in a morass of fighting with each over bills that nobody knows what’s in,” she said.
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has said Biden is fading fast.
“The president’s decline is alarming. It’s serious,” Rosenberg said. “But it also can be reversed. … He has to get COVID under control.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
