The vast majority of U.S. adults still believe the country is divided, despite President Joe Biden’s vow to be a more unifying president, an NBC News poll released Sunday revealed.
The poll, released on the cusp of Biden’s first 100 days in office, revealed just more than a third, or 36 percent, say the country is headed in the “right direction.” Meanwhile, the vast majority of respondents, 82 percent, believe the country is divided.
This comes amid Biden’s vow to unify the country with his presidency, making the theme central to his inaugural address in January.
“To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires the most elusive of things in a democracy: unity. Unity,” Biden said during his January 20 address.
Biden told the country his “whole soul” was “in this,” wholly devoted to “bringing America together,” “uniting our people,” and “uniting our nation.”
“Uniting to fight the common foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.
Biden continued:
With unity we can do great things. Important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome this deadly virus. We can reward work, rebuild the middle class and make healthcare secure for all.
We can deliver racial justice. We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.
I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear and demonization have long torn us apart.
Notably, despite his call for unity, Biden demonized his fellow Americans in the same speech in which he lamented what he described as “the rise of political extremism, white supremacy, [and] domestic terrorism.”
The 78-year-old president has failed to demonstrate unity in a variety of ways, even before taking office, as Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak extensively detailed.
Biden’s term began with a second, divisive impeachment effort against former President Trump. All the while, he has seemingly continued to support “cancel culture” as members of the far-left continue to fan the flames of racial division. More recently, Biden failed to demonstrate unity after slamming states, particularly Georgia, for pursuing basic election integrity laws, calling them “un-American” and “sick” and likening them to the Jim Crow era.
The survey, taken April 17-20 among 1,000 adults, has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.