Biden scores 70 percent approval rating among American Jews
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Approval numbers among American Jewish voters for President Joe Biden are 70%, an American Jewish Committee poll found, while 26% of Jewish voters disapprove of his job performance.
The survey published Wednesday, the first in Biden’s presidency to measure his ratings among Jewish voters, is commensurate with past Jewish support for Democratic presidents. It also found once again that Orthodox voters hold up a mirror image to the broader community, with just 19 percent of that community approving of Biden’s performance.
The survey is released as Biden seeks to crush the coronavirus pandemic that consumed the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, calm racial tensions roiled by a year of protests against police violence, revive the economy, and manage the crisis engendered by the war last month between Israel and Hamas.
The survey showed that 79% of respondents approved of his handling of the COVID 19 pandemic and 19% disapproved; 68% approved of his handling of race relations and 28% disapproved, and 71% approved of his handling of the economy while 27% disapproved. On antisemitism, which has spiked in recent months, 64% approve of how Biden handles the threat while 23% disapprove.
Biden did not fare as well on the immigration issue during a crisis as migrants rush the Mexico-U.S. border: 54% of respondents approved and 42% disapproved of how he handled immigration.
Also featuring narrower gaps were his handling of the Middle East: 58% percent approve of his handling of U.S.-Israel relations while 27% disapprove. The survey of 1,000 respondents reached by phone took place from March 25-May 9, the day before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Biden also wants to reenter the Iran nuclear deal. The survey found that 55% percent of respondents approve of Biden’s handling of the Iranian nuclear issue while 32% do not.
The survey was carried out by the SSRS research firm and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points, although the margin would be larger for subsets, for instance, in measuring Orthodox approval.
Elements of the survey covering “U.S. political issues, U.S-Israel relations, and the peace process,” will be released later this month, an AJC release said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
