President Biden and Seniors: One Year On

By Martin Burns

One year since his inauguration, how is President Biden faring with seniors (those 65 and over)? Unfortunately, the news for the president is not good. According to new polling from CBS News fully 60 percent of seniors disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job while 40 percent approve. Seniors are the most disapproving age group of Biden’s job. Perhaps most worrisome for the White House is the that 50 percent of seniors strongly disapprove of Biden’s performance.

There is not any good news for Biden on the specific aspects of his job. Sixty-three percent (63%) of seniors disapprove of Biden’s job performance in handling the economy while 68% disapprove of his efforts on immigration and an overwhelming 70 percent give Biden negative grades on handling inflation.

On handling the coronavirus outbreak, 55 percent of seniors (14% somewhat bad, 41% very bad) give Biden negative scores.

Looking for positive nuggets in the generally bad polling data, the Biden White House is likely to note that 52 percent of seniors like the way that Biden handles himself personally.

One very interesting note in the CBS data is that the top issue for seniors is voting rights and access (24%) followed by illegal immigration (21%), inflation (19%) and the coronavirus outbreak (18%).

There is not a lot in the CBS polling data that the White House can easily impact with one exception: among those who gave Biden negative grades for dealing with Coronavirus fully 88 percent of seniors said that they did so because “information about the outbreak has been confusing.” If the Biden administration can strengthen and clarify its communications around COVID-19, it may reap both public health and political gain.