President Joe Biden’s approval numbers continue to collapse, with the latest bad news for Biden showing that a large majority think Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if former President Donald Trump were still in office.
The latest Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris Poll survey, released on Friday, showed that a massive 62 percent of respondents said Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was emboldened to invade Ukraine because Biden is in the White House, not Trump.
Breaking down the numbers by party shows an unsurprising split, with 85 percent of Republicans saying Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump was president versus 38 percent of Democrats who agreed with that statement, The Hill reported.
But the poll also had bad news for Biden because 59 percent said that they think Putin moved on Ukraine because he thinks Biden is too weak to do anything about it. Forty-one percent said that was “not a factor,” according to The Hill.
The poll was conducted online Feb. 23 and Feb. 24 and surveyed 2,026 registered voters. It did not have a margin of error, The Hill reported. The survey itself did not appear to be publicly available — coverage by other news outlets was based on the report published by The Hill.
This is a pretty stark result, especially considering the fact that Biden ran as the candidate who was “serious” on foreign policy. In fact, Biden mentioned Putin by name in a February 2020 tweet boasting about how the Russian president feared a Joe Biden presidency.
“Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him,” Biden bragged.
Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 21, 2020
Well, events only a year into Biden’s presidency sure made that tweet look like empty boasting. Putin seems to have no worries about any tough-talking Joe Biden.
Biden also claimed he was the better man to stop Russian aggression during the 2019 Democratic National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum Conference.
“It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work to make up for all of the damage he’s done internationally and nationally,” Biden said of Trump during the event. “His network of thugs and co-conspirators are going to continue to try to undermine our democracy in the meantime.”
“Imagine what he can do in another year,” Biden added. “Imagine what can happen in Ukraine.”
Apparently, Putin was imagining what could happen in Ukraine if Trump were not reelected — and imagining it with relish.
While Putin seemed to have no compunctions about challenging Biden like this, it was a different story with Donald Trump. The former president recently noted that he repeatedly warned Putin not to try and take Ukraine while Trump sat in the White House.
“I knew that he always wanted Ukraine. I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it,’” Trump told radio interviewers Clay Travis and Buck Sexton last week.
It isn’t just the administration’s clear failure over stopping Russian aggression against Ukraine for which Americans are giving Joe Biden failing grades. Polling shows him below 50 percent on every metric and going into the 2022 midterm election season, which is very, very, bad news for Biden and the Democrats.
The dismal polling started last year. By November of 2021, a majority said that they did not support Joe Biden’s plan to seek reelection in 2024, according to a Rasmussen poll. The poll found that 56 percent of those polled thought Biden should not run for a second term.
But it keeps getting worse. Just last month, for instance, CNBC reported that a CNBC/Change Research poll found that 56 percent of voters disapproved of the job Joe Biden is doing as president. That was worse than the 54 percent who disapproved in a poll taken by the same polling firm in September.
And just two weeks ago, another poll found that even left-wing California had more voters who disapproved than approved of Biden. Forty-eight percent disapproved of Biden in California while 47 percent approved, according to the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released on Feb. 16.
Indeed, a majority of Americans don’t even think that Biden’s mental status is sharp enough to allow him to be our president.
A Rasmussen poll released Feb. 17 found that 47 percent strongly agree that Joe Biden’s mental decline has become glaringly obvious. Fifty-six percent said that Biden wasn’t fit for the job while 45 percent said they weren’t confident in his mental state.
In any case, Putin’s vote on Biden’s mental state seems pretty clear.