“This has been one of the biggest debacles we have seen in the last several decades,” one reporter says on camera. An overwhelming percentage of Americans apparently agree, and not just in this new CBS poll. We are just starting to see polling data that incorporates the debacle in Kabul, the administration’s shifting positions on troop strength and deadlines, and the images from Hamid Karzai Airport with the violence erupting all around it.
CBS News fronted this poll in a morning segment with a lot of the context, but not a ton of the data:
President Biden said the U.S. military is speeding up evacuations of Americans and Afghans, as the situation at the Kabul airport deteriorates.
A @CBSNews poll finds 63% of Americans support removing troops from Afghanistan, but 74% believe the withdrawal has gone badly. pic.twitter.com/0WhJgw9olI
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) August 23, 2021
The poll is just brutal on the question of execution, if not the policy itself. Two-thirds of respondents still prefer getting out of Afghanistan, but three-quarters don’t believe Biden when he claims it couldn’t have been done any better. And that has respondents questioning Biden’s judgment and capacity in a much broader sense:
Public reaction to what’s happened there is decidedly negative, with Americans now fearing wider repercussions from a heightened threat of terrorism. Back home, the public weighs in with rough judgments on President Biden — not only for his handling of it, but with his overall presidential approval rating dropping substantially, and broader views of his qualities like effectiveness and competence taking hits along with it.
Take a look at the very narrow range of support Biden gets on this question:
A 55% majority also adds that troops should have remained in Kabul in the first place. The withdrawal of troops, and the reinsertion of a much more expanded force, makes little sense — and people have started to figure that out, even with Biden spinning like a top for the past ten days. That spin has put Biden underwater overall, as well as in regard to his handling of Russia (48/52) and China (47/53). It’s beginning to look like a crisis of confidence, similar to what afflicted Jimmy Carter over the last year-plus of his presidency due to his feckless response to the embassy sacking in Tehran.
Moreover, Biden can’t assign this to simple partisanship. Sixty-one percent of Democrats say that the removal of troops should have been handled better, and 63% of Democrats now question why troops were removed before the evacuation at all. Sixty-two percent of Democrats (and 69% of Biden 2020 voters) believe the withdrawal has been handled either very badly or somewhat badly; under forty percent respond positively in either demo. Comparatively, 76% of independents think it’s gone somewhat or very badly, with just 24% offering any positive response.
Seventy-one percent of Democrats still claim to support Biden’s handling of the withdrawal, but that support is looking pretty precarious at the moment.
A few more questions show Biden’s big problem. Only a third of respondents think Biden has a clear plan for evacuating American civilians from Afghanistan. Sixty-two percent give Biden some or most of the blame for the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, a view also held by 42% of Biden 2020 voters. That compares to 50% who assign some or most of the blame to Donald Trump, which demonstrates that Biden’s attempt to pass the buck are not resonating.
And this should give Democrats the cold sweats in more ways than one:
Terrorism had been a declining concern among American voters for the last several years, a development that benefited Democrats. Now even a plurality of Democrats think terrorism will increase as a result of Biden’s withdrawal.
Is this an outlier? A new NBC poll suggests otherwise:
After a spike in U.S. Covid-19 cases and bipartisan criticism over the chaos from America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden’s overall job-approval rating has dipped below 50 percent among adults for the first time in his early presidency, according to a new NBC News poll.
The poll also finds fewer Americans support Biden’s handling of the coronavirus and the economy now than they did last spring, and just a quarter of respondents approve of his handling of Afghanistan.
There is less granularity about Afghanistan in this poll than the CBS/YouGov survey (and no crosstabs either), but the trend lines are similar. Those trend lines can be seen more clearly in this RCP graph, which prompted a reporter to question Biden about his grasp on political reality in yesterday’s presser:
This data does not include the CBS or NBC polls. When RCP incorporates that data into its graph, the trend lines will look even more pronounced. It’s notable, however, that this falloff in support appears to have strengthened in early July, a month before the fall of Kabul and a couple of weeks or so before the Taliban sweep began. Biden was already having trouble, but this debacle has made it much more acute. Imagine what this will look like in a month or so.
