In the 2020 election, 81,286,365 people voted for Joe Biden, 74,225,845 for President Donald Trump.
If you’re not a math whiz, that 51.26% of the vote for now-President Biden, 46.80 for former President Trump.
So that makes a new poll all the more ominous for Biden, who has seen his approval rating plummet in nearly every poll as he struggles to handle domestic and international crises.
A Gallup poll released on Tuesday finds Americans’ confidence in “the presidency” as an institution has dropped to 23% from 38% in 2021 — a record low since the survey began in 1973.
But it wasn’t just the presidency that took a hit. The survey found that an average of just 27% of those polled had either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 major institutions that Gallup has measured for decades: the church/organized religion, the military, the Supreme Court, banks, public schools, newspapers, Congress, organized labor, big business, television news, the presidency, the police, the medical system, and the criminal justice system.
The new confidence level in the 14 sectors is down from 32% in 2021 and even plunged below the previous low of 30% in 2014.
“Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court — as reported in late June before the court issued controversial rulings on gun laws and abortion — and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden’s job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021,” Gallup wrote.
Not surprisingly, Americans have the most confidence in small business, with 68% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” down just 2% from last year.
The survey also found that all partisan groups “are generally less confident in the 16 U.S. institutions than they were a year ago.”
Democrats and independents show more than a double-digit loss of confidence in the Supreme Court, with no meaningful change among Republicans.
Republicans have lost more confidence in banks than the other party groups have. Republicans also show double-digit declines in confidence in the military and the police.
Independents are significantly less confident in organized religion than a year ago, while there has been a smaller drop among Republicans and no real change among Democrats.
The Gallup survey follows another by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that found that 85% of U.S. adults believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.