Joe Biden's Approval Rating Tanks as 60 Percent Disapprove of Afghanistan Handling: Poll
President Joe Biden's approval rating has taken a substantial hit as a clear majority of Americans do not approve of how he handled the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that Biden's approval rating now stands at just 44 percent, while his disapproval rate is now at 51 percent following the military drawdown that ended on August 31.
One of the poll's key findings is that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, 77 percent of respondents supported leaving the country.
These numbers appear to indicate that while ending the 20-year war is popular, most Americans are unhappy with how the troop withdrawal was carried out.
Just 30 percent of respondents approved of Biden's handling of the withdrawal, while 10 percent had no opinion.
The Biden administration had been criticized for chaotic scenes in the Afghan capital of Kabul as the Taliban seized the city.
On August 26, a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport killed 13 U.S. troops and at least 170 Afghans.
ISIS-K, a Central Asia affiliate of the Islamic State group (ISIS), claimed responsibility for the attack. Biden pledged to "hunt down" the ISIS-K perpetrators of the bombing but received significant criticism because of it.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted between August 29 and September 1 among a random national sample of 1,006 adults in English and Spanish. The margin of error was 3.5 percent.
Biden's overall approval rating has declined six points since June, according to the same polling, down from 52 percent to 44 percent. The president's disapproval has jumped 9 percent in the same period, from 42 percent to 51 percent.
The poll also asked respondents whether the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting. It found 36 percent of Americans thought the war was worth fighting, while 54 percent said it was not.
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attacks. The war is estimated to have cost around $2 trillion over 20 years. The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan is around 2,500.
On the issue of the Kabul airport bombing, 53 percent of respondents said Biden's handling of the withdrawal bears a "great deal" or a "good amount" of the blame for the attack, while 43 percent said it bears "not much" blame or none at all.
Biden's approval rating has been on a downward trajectory in the past few weeks which appears to have been exacerbated by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Poll tracker FiveThirtyEight, which tracks Biden's popularity based on analysis of a wide range of polls and its own system of pollster ratings, gave Biden a disapproval rate of 48 percent and approval of 46.2 percent on Friday morning.
However, FiveThirtyEight's analysis had not taken into account the new ABC News/Washington Post poll at the time of writing.
