President-elect Joe Biden is already more popular than Donald Trump was at any point during his presidency, new polling has revealed.
With 44 days to go until Biden becomes the 46th President of the United States, a Gallup poll put the Democrat on an approval rating of 55 per cent.
And, amid his flailing attempts to discredit and overturn the election results, Trump’s approval rating is down at 42 per cent – a three per cent plunge since the election.
Trump’s highest approval rating was 50 per cent, in a Bloomberg News poll shortly after his shock victory in 2016. He has remained historically unpopular across his four years in office.
But, in a sign of the difficulties Biden is likely to face governing, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are difficult to separate popularity-wise, with the former on 45 per cent and the latter at 43 per cent.
Meanwhile Biden has picked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to be his health secretary, putting a defender of the Affordable Care Act in a leading role to oversee his administration’s coronavirus response.
If confirmed by the Senate Becerra, 62, will be the first Latino to head the Department of Health and Human Services, an agency with 80,000 employees and a portfolio including drugs and vaccines, leading-edge medical research and health insurance programs covering more than 130 million Americans.
As California’s attorney general, Becerra has led the coalition of Democratic states defending Obamacare from the Trump administration’s latest effort to overturn it, a legal case awaiting a Supreme Court decision next year.
A former senior House Democrat, Becerra played a role in steering the Obama health law through Congress in 2009 and 2010. At the time he would tell reporters that one of the primary motivations for him was having tens of thousands of uninsured people in his Southern California district.
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