Americans are feeling better about Covid, but not Joe Biden

When President Joe Biden was inaugurated as the nation’s 46th president, there was a familiar mantra from many analysts: As Covid goes, so goes the Biden presidency. Now, 17 months in, that thinking seems to have been somewhat misguided.

Polls show Americans are generally feeling quite a bit better about Covid and a return to normalcy, but not so good about the White House.

A June Ipsos poll found 42% of Americans said their own lives have “already returned to normal.” Considering where the country in the pandemic even six months ago, that’s a pretty positive number.

And it is a vast improvement — 14 percentage points — over where attitudes were in June of 2021, when vaccinations had started but their entire impact had not yet taken root. Last June only 28% of Americans said their lives had returned to normal.

But compare Joe Biden job approval numbers from Ipsos in the same data and you don’t see an improvement, but a decline.

In June of 2021, Biden was sitting in positive territory in the Ipsos poll, with a 52% job approval rating. Now, a year later, with what seem to be better Covid numbers, Biden’s job approval number is down to 39% — 13 percentage points lower.

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What happened to Biden’s good numbers? As in every presidency, unexpected things happen and the Biden White House has had its share, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation and a shortage of baby formula.

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But people’s attitudes about Covid may have changed as well. In that latest Ipsos poll there was a much higher number of people saying their lives had already returned to normal than last year, but there was also an undercurrent of concern that Covid is a longer-term problem.

In June of 2021, only 16% of those surveyed said a return to normalcy was more than a year away or that it was never going to happen. In this latest survey, 33% gave one of those answers.

In other words, some Americans seem to be feeling a lot better about the state of the Covid pandemic, but others seem to feel worse about the rise of the Covid endemic.