At the same time, the withdrawal itself remained broadly popular, with 63% approving of the US removing its troops from Afghanistan. Even among the minority who disapproved, a significant fraction said they thought the removal of troops should have been handled better, rather than that it shouldn’t have happened at all. Only about one-fifth of the public both disapproved of the withdrawal and said their disapproval was because some US troops should have stayed behind.
The two latest surveys also tell somewhat different stories about Biden’s current ratings on Afghanistan, but both show him underwater on the issue. The President’s approval rating for handling the removal of US troops from Afghanistan stands at 47%, per CBS/YouGov, down from 60% in July. The NBC poll puts him further into negative territory, with just 25% approving of his handling of the situation in Afghanistan.
Both surveys found Americans closely split on Biden’s overall job performance, a decline from his positive numbers earlier this year. In the CBS/YouGov poll, 50% approved and 50% disapproved (down from July, when 58% approved and 42% disapproved). In NBC’s poll, 49% approved and 48% disapproved (down from 53% approval and 39% disapproval in April).
NBC’s pollsters, similarly, noted Americans’ rising pessimism about Covid-19 and the country in general as bigger factors. Just 37% of Americans in that poll said the worst of the pandemic in the US was already behind us, down from 61% in April. And just 29% said things in the nation were generally headed in the right direction, down from 36% in the spring.
“The best way to understand this poll is to forget Afghanistan,” pollster Bill McInturff, the Republican half of NBC’s bipartisan polling team, told the network.
The CBS News/YouGov poll surveyed 2,142 US adults on August 18-20 using a nationally representative online panel, with a margin of sampling error of ±2.3 points. The NBC News poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, surveyed 1,000 US adults on August 14-17, using live telephone interviews to reach both landlines and cell phones. It had a margin of sampling error of ±3.1 points.