Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters nationwide now approve of the way President Biden is performing his job. A Scott Rasmussen national survey found that 48% disapprove and 4% are not sure. That’s essentially unchanged from a week ago.
Those totals include 25% who Strongly Approve and 35% who Strongly Disapprove.
Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters at least somewhat favor the president’s vaccination mandate order. At the same time, however, 54% of voters nationwide believe vaccine requirements should be determined in the private sector.
How can a majority think decisions should be made in the private sector at the same time a majority supports Biden’s top-down approach? 
It turns out that just 36% of those who favor the president’s plan believe the federal government should make such decisions. Another 20% of those who support the president’s mandate believe the decision should be made at the state or local level. At the same time, 27% believe the decision should be made either by individual companies or workers.
These results suggest that support for the president’s plan is driven more by partisan loyalty rather than the plan itself.
Adding to the softness of support for the president’s vaccine mandate is the fact that just 33% of voters believe he has the legal authority to order private companies to impose a vaccine requirement. Even among those who favor the plan, just over half (54%) believe Biden has the legal authority to impose it.
Related data shows that 39% of voters have relatives or close friends who will get vaccinated against their will because they don’t want to lose their job. That total includes 60% of Hispanic voters.
Additionally, 66% of voters are close to resuming their normal life in terms of going out socially, traveling, and interacting with others in person.
Still, pessimism about the pandemic remains high. Just 28%believe the worst is behind us. Forty-five percent (45%) believe the worst is yet to come. That matches the most pessimistic assessment since the vaccines rolled out in January.
Methodology
The survey of 1,200 Registered Voters was conducted by Scott Rasmussen using a mixed mode approach from September 16-18, 2021. Field work for the survey was conducted by RMG Research, Inc. Most respondents were contacted online or via text while 263 were contacted using automated phone polling techniques. Online respondents were selected from a list of Registered Voters and through a process of Random Digital Engagement. Certain quotas were applied, and the sample was lightly weighted by geography, gender, age, race, education, internet usage, and political party to reasonably reflect the nation’s population of Registered Voters. Other variables were reviewed to ensure that the final sample is representative of that population.
The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 2.8 percentage points.
