WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- The White House continues to lose ground with the American public on such issues as response to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recovery, while Americans are divided on the Supreme Court, according to a new poll released on Sunday.
SHARP DROP OF APPROVAL ON PANDEMIC HANDLING
U.S. President Joe Biden, who just marked the one-year anniversary of his term, has lost the approval of almost one fifth of Americans on his response to the coronavirus, dropping from 69 percent approval in January 2021 to the current 50 percent, the ABC News/Ipsos poll showed.
Views of the veteran politician, the survey presented, remain strongly tied to partisanship with four in five Democrats approving his handling of the pandemic versus less than one in five Republicans.
The United States has reported more than 74 million COVID-19 infections and 884,000 deaths as of Sunday night, both the highest in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently said 99.9 percent of new infections in the country are driven by the Omicron variant, which is believed to spread more easily than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has recently warned of a COVID-19 variant that can evade vaccines and natural immunity.
"The worst-case scenario is we're on our way there and we get hit with another variant that actually eludes the immune protection," Fauci told Yahoo Finance during an interview last week. "I hope that's not the case."
SIMILAR DROP IN RATING OF BIDEN'S ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
Biden has lost similar levels of support on his handling of economic recovery, down 18 points from the 60-percent approval in March 2021 to 42 percent now, the poll underlined, although his administration has recently cheered the country's economic growth rate.
The poll found only one in four Americans would describe the U.S. economy as excellent or good, while 75 percent of the surveyed saw it as not so good or poor.
Prices for most consumer goods in the United States have continued rising in the new year, as real wages are falling. U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, tweeted on Saturday that "Americans can't afford more Bidenomics."
"Inflation is a problem," Biden acknowledged during an event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Friday. "It's real and a lot of people are being hurt by it."
MIXED VIEWS ON SUPREME COURT
The ABC News/Ipsos questionnaire also asked how Americans think of the Supreme Court -- the highest court in the federal judiciary -- and Biden's handling of a new justice.
According to the findings, 38 percent of Americans said they believe the court, where conservatives currently have a 6-3 advantages over liberals, decides cases "on the basis of law" while 43 percent argued it acts "on the basis of their partisan political views."
The findings also showed that up to 76 percent of Americans believe Biden should "consider all possible nominees" rather than stick to "only nominees who are Black women."
Biden last week reaffirmed his commitment to nominating an African American woman for the Supreme Court after liberal Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he will retire this summer. The president is expected to announce a pick in February.
U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Sunday that it was too early to consider anyone a "front-runner" for the role.
"I think suggesting there's a front-runner or this person is now moving ahead, that's unfair to all the nominees. This is in the hands of the president as it should be," Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told NBC's "Meet the Press" during an interview.
U.S. Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said on Sunday that she thinks the way Biden has approached the nomination has been "clumsy at best."
"It adds to the further perception that the court is a political institution like Congress when it is not supposed to be," Collins said on ABC's "This Week."
Public approval of other facets of the Biden administration is also more negative than positive, including two-thirds disapproving of his handling of gun violence and 64 percent disapproving his handling of crime, the ABC News/Ipsos added.
The research was conducted on Friday and Saturday and based on a nationally representative probability sample of 510 adults age 18 or older, with a margin of error of 4.9 points. ■