The NPR Politics Podcast - For Now, 73 Percent Of Americans Support Allowing Afghan Refugees Resettle in U.S.

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

President Joe Biden's approval rating has dropped to a new low, 43 percent, according to a new poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist College. Americans are split about what should have happened in Afghanistan, but a large majority label the U.S. role in the country a "failure."The poll found that a historically large majority of Americans approve of resettling Afghan refugees in the United States, but that number could decline as the political fight heats up.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Darren in New York City. I just said goodbye to my husband who is going back to work on Broadway today after 18 months off. You're listening to the NPR Politics podcast that was recorded at 206 Eastern Time on Thursday, September 2. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this podcast, but I'll still be relishing my alone time. I guess that means Broadway's back. I kind of missed that headline, but shows are back. Theaters are back. I guess so.

Well, hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. We are beginning to get an initial understanding of how the withdrawal from Afghanistan is affecting Americans' views of President Biden.

In the latest NPR-PBS NewsHour Mayor's poll, the president's approval rating slid to 43 percent. That's down six points from July. And it marks the lowest approval rating for Biden in these polls since he took office. We are obviously still a ways away from the 2022 midterms, but a shift in public opinion, you know, even if it is temporary, could still have consequences for Biden and his political agenda. I mean, isn't that right, Ron? Yes, it is right. And there's no question that this has thrown a chill into the Democrats on Capitol Hill, both with respect to those midterm elections you mentioned, their margins in both chambers are virtually non-existent,

and also with respect to all of the heavy lifting they need to do in the weeks ahead, the infrastructure bill, the enormous budget package that the president has asked for. Those were already in some degree of peril and certainly not assured. And Democratic, shall we say, unity is almost an oxymoron. So this is a terrible time to have the president drop. You know, if you go back most of the year, a lot of the conversation had been it's obviously a deeply divided country. But Joe Biden, even with the narrowest of narrow margins in Congress, was able to get massive things through or on the verge of being through, you know, spending and development that we haven't seen in generations and generations. And now suddenly it seems like, you know, especially if you look at those numbers with independents, it looks like a very different presidency all of the sudden. It's going to be more difficult to get cooperation from moderates in both parties because those people in particular are highly sensitive to what independents are feeling. At the same time, we have seen presidents take a hit in the past and come back, particularly if it comes relatively early in their first term

and they have time to recover before the midterms or before their re-election year comes around. Even Ronald Reagan, whom we most really remember as being a terribly popular president, dropped all the way to 35 percent early in his first term and did come back, of course, to win overwhelmingly his re-election. Forty-nine states. That's win overwhelmingly his reelection. 49 states. That's right. Every single one of 49 states. I think it's important for us, though, to take a deep dive behind the top line numbers in this

poll, because when you look at the specifics, Scott, you mentioned independence. The overall decline that we're seeing in Biden's popularity is mostly due to independence. Just 36% of them approve of the job that Biden is doing. That is a 10 point drop in the last month. And it feels like Biden is beginning to see some of the same kind of enmity that Donald Trump did. You have a whopping 41% of US adults who now say they strongly disapprove of the job that he's doing. I mean, it's interesting for so long, Republicans really struggle to find a message that stuck against Joe Biden, right? I mean, you saw, you know, sometimes cartoonish characterizations of him throughout the campaign, throughout the early months of the presidency, and they just didn't

seem to register with voters. But I feel like, you know, especially we've talked so much about how this administration is always trying to focus on its message of the day, its theme of the day. It's always trying to deal with the things within its control, saying, no, we're talking about this today. This is what we're doing today. The last couple months have been a story of them being overwhelmed by outside events, some entirely beyond their control, like Delta taking hold and suddenly bringing this pandemic back, you know, and unprecedented wildfires and hurricanes and flooding and just every natural disaster you can think of hitting America right now. control. I mean, as he keeps saying, he did not anticipate the Afghan military, the Afghan government collapsing so quickly. But Biden made a decision here to pull the US out of Afghanistan and end a 20 year war. And most of the summer has been dealing with the consequences of that

decision. You know, we asked a number of questions in this survey about Afghanistan. And predictably, most everything about the war and most everything we asked about terrorism fell along partisan lines, I will say, except for two things. One, which is that an overwhelming 71% think the war in Afghanistan was a failure. There is bipartisan consensus about it. A lot of people think that the exit was handled poorly, but it seems like there is a question about who to blame for that failure. Absolutely. And the answer to that question seems to fall very much along partisan lines, as you might expect. But the president that people seem to be holding responsible more than anyone else for Afghanistan would be George W. Bush, who brought us into Afghanistan in the first place, trying to get al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in 2001 in the immediate wake of

the 9-11 attacks. At that time, of course, there was a lot of energy behind that, and the country wanted revenge, and the country wanted an end to these kinds of attacks and was very fearful about further al-Qaeda attacks. So in that sense, virtually anything was legitimate in the eyes of many voters. Then, of course, Barack Obama stayed, and he comes in for a lot of criticism, too. He gets his share right behind Joe Biden among Republicans. But then Donald Trump, also certainly among Democrats, is right up there as well behind George W. Bush because, well, because he's the other Republican in the survey. And, you know, the big picture view that those

numbers represent is something the Biden administration talks a lot about and seems to be banking on that, that in the end, they think, overwhelmingly, Americans wanted to be out of Afghanistan. And they hope that over time, more Americans will focus on the fact that that war is over, again, over in the sense that there are not American troops there anymore. There will still be drone attacks and missile attacks in Afghanistan. There's still a lot of violence for people living in Afghanistan. But as far as American soldiers are concerned, the war is over. You know, I mentioned that there were two things in this poll that had a clear bipartisan consensus.

The other nugget to me was more surprising. We found that nearly three quarters, 73 percent, say they support allowing Afghan refugees to come to the United States. And the reason I say it's surprising is if you look at it in terms of historical numbers, it's really unprecedented compared to previous past wars. According to our story, only 16 percent of Americans were in favor of bringing refugees after World War II, after the Holocaust, from Europe. That's hard to believe. It's a heartbreaking number. But it wasn't that much higher after Vietnam, when Gerald Ford, then the president and Congress, saw to it that more than 100,000 Vietnamese were eventually brought to the United States. And they have prospered here. There are now more than a million Vietnamese in this country. They're the fifth largest immigrant group.

And that could be in the future for the Afghans. We don't know that yet. But we are heartened to see that three-quarters of the people in this country feel responsibility for what happened to those people. And if the best solution is for them to come here, at least according to this poll at this moment, we're willing to have them among us. That's a key phrase at this moment, Ron, right? Because I'm reminded by the sentiments that we saw, for example, a very different situation, but after George Floyd and Black Lives Matter's popularity really ticked up. I mean, given the just the currency that cultural issues have in

this country, I'm not convinced that these numbers are permanent, right? We've already begun to see a number of Republicans in Congress who do oppose large numbers of refugees from Afghanistan coming to the United States. All right, well, we're going to take a quick break. We'll have more to talk about in just a minute. And we're back. This poll was in part tied to the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We asked people how safe the country is now compared to before the attacks at the turn of the century. Yeah, a couple questions in the poll, you know, one was about do you think the country is less safe than it was before the attacks? 44% of people felt that way. 30% think it's safer.

A quarter say it's about the same, which seems kind of a low number given the immense amount of things that have gone into effect and stayed in effect for, you know, the decades since. Another question that's, I think, interesting over the past couple years especially, and especially after January 6th, more people now believe domestic terrorism is a greater threat than international terrorism. It's kind of close. 49% think domestic terrorism is the greater threat. 41% think international is. That's right. And that's not terribly far from the disapproval split for Joe Biden. And it does have a very strong partisan component, both in terms of safety and in terms of whether it should be primarily international terrorism we fear or domestic terrorism that we fear. Republicans are much more likely to say we should fear international terrorism, 70%. Republicans are also two-thirds saying we're less safe today. Now, you have to wonder if you ask that same question

a year ago with Donald Trump president or two years ago with Donald Trump president, would as many Republicans be willing to say we were less safe than we were before 9-11? That seems highly dubious. So there is a partisan component here. And it's particularly interesting that among Democrats, you just get this flip, and they say, no, we're in more danger from domestic terrorism. That's the 71% among Democrats. And that's got to be reflecting to some degree, January 6. Yeah, I mean, every poll we go through in this podcast, and increasingly every issue, you can just see through that partisan lens of how it's really not that many points off the split that we see in presidential elections and everything else.

Scott, you know, we said that this poll is tied to the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. And you mentioned earlier this week that you've been doing a lot of reporting ahead of the anniversary of those attacks. And tomorrow in the podcast feed, we're actually going to hear your reporting in a special episode. So tell us about that. Yeah, and I just want to flag it's going to sound a lot different than our podcast usually does. This is a pretty detailed story, focusing in on Flight 93, which was the plane that was likely headed to the US Capitol before the passengers and crew fought back. So instead, it crashed just outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I co-reported this story with my friend Tim Lambert, who's a reporter in Pennsylvania. He actually, he was a co-worker at WITF, the very first station I worked at. And as you'll hear in the piece, Tim has a really intense and unique personal tie to Flight 93. And because of that,

there's a lot of reporting that has just never been heard before that's going to be in this episode. So I'm really excited to have finished it, and I'm really excited for people to hear it tomorrow. Scott, there are going to be an awful lot of people trying to think of new things to say about 9-11 over the next few days, and this is genuinely something that is original and brings us a different perspective than we've had. So really looking forward to it. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think, you know, one thing that we thought a lot about is, obviously, so many overwhelmingly terrible things happened that day. But over the years, Flight 93 has kind of receded from the main point of view. And, you know, I covered it when I was a reporter in Pennsylvania. But then when I was covering Congress, you go into that building

every single day, that's a building that's still standing as it is because of what happened on that flight. So it's not something that should be forgotten. And you can listen to Scott's reporting in your podcast feeds wherever you normally listen to the NPR Politics Podcast. It'll be there tomorrow morning. All right, we are going to leave it there for now. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thank you all for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.