New polling from AP-NORC continues to show that President Joe Biden’s handling of the coronavirus is key to his entire presidency. And so far, Americans continue to really like what they see. The poll found that 71% of respondents approve of Biden’s pandemic handling, including 47% of Republicans.

Biden’s overall approval rating in the poll is 63%—an inflated outlier from the nearly mid-50s range around which Biden has been hovering for the past few weeks in FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate.

The survey also found that 54% of respondents think the country is on the right track—the highest overall sense of optimism in any AP-NORC poll conducted since 2017. That optimism also seems inherently linked to Americans’ fears about the pandemic, which are also at their lowest levels since the U.S. outbreak began in February 2020. “About half of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried that they or a relative could be infected with the virus, down from about 7 in 10 just a month earlier,” writes the AP.

Civiqs data on the U.S. government response to the pandemic has also steadily improved since Biden took office, with 61% now saying they are completely/mostly satisfied with the response and 35% indicating they are not satisfied. It’s almost a 180 degree turnaround from the day Biden was sworn in, when 63% said they weren’t satisfied with government efforts and just 33% said they were.

Civiqs Results

Coronavirus news in the U.S. continues to be positive. Although the rate of vaccinations is slowing as the effort contends with people who are vaccine hesitant, several models now predict that COVID-19 cases will dip sharply by midsummer. That’s a particularly striking finding as the nation watches horrors that have taken hold in other parts of the world—India, in particular. In fact, in many ways, the world has gone from marveling at America’s flailing response and soaring death/infection rates under Donald Trump to envying the pace of vaccination rates and improved health of the population under the Biden administration.

This phase of Biden’s presidency is likely to get much tougher, as indicated by the unexpectedly weak jobs report that dropped last Friday. But Americans hired Biden to stem the outbreak of the pandemic here in the U.S., and they will likely give the president some leeway to deal with other vexing problems if his administration continues to make steady progress on stamping out the pandemic. That progress will include convincing more people who have shown hesitancy to get vaccinated along with increasingly opening up vaccinations to younger people, a prospect that is very much on the horizon for the Pfizer vaccine, in particular.