Most adults responding to the Gallup poll see the Biden administration as unethical, driven by historically low marks from Republicans.
The polling company reported Thursday that 55% of respondents to a survey found the ethics of “top Biden administration officials” to be “poor” or “not good,” compared to 42% who described them as “good” or “excellent.” The remainder — about 3% — were unsure.
That’s the second-worst moral assessment since the polling company first asked about the Reagan administration in 1983. The worst was the Trump administration, whose ethics earned a positive rating from 37% and 38% of adults responding to two separate polls during his term in office.
In the latest poll, Gallup noted that only 6% of Republicans viewed the ethics of the Biden administration positively, compared with 84% of Democrats and 41% of independents.
Gallup said the low marks from Republicans suggest they do not believe Biden has kept promises he made after taking office “by signing an executive order on ethics, committing his administration to certain high standards in doing the public’s business and avoiding personal conflicts of interest.”
“Republicans’ extraordinarily low confidence in Biden administration ethics could also be connected to IRS whistleblower claims about FBI and Justice Department favoritism toward the president’s son, Hunter Biden, in their investigations of him for federal corruption, as well as tax and gun crimes,” Gallup said.
While members of the opposite party tend to view an administration’s ethics negatively, the company noted that this year’s 6% rating from Republicans hit a new bottom for partisan divisions.
Before the Trump administration, the lowest rating in the Gallup trend occurred in 2013, when 50% of those surveyed expressed a favorable view of the Obama administration’s ethics. The best rating came in 2002, when 74% of all adults surveyed viewed the George W. Bush administration as highly ethical in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.
According to the company, the 42% of adults who expressed a favorable view of the Biden administration’s ethics nearly matched the 40% approval rating the president received in the same poll.
Gallup conducted a randomized national telephone survey of 1,015 adults on July 3-27. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
