Biden's approval rating jumps to 47% after State of the Union speech, with a noticeable boost for his handling of Ukraine and the economy: poll

• President Biden's job approval rating reached 47% in the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
• Biden saw his numbers slip post-Afghanistan, but the March numbers seemingly indicate a rebound.

President Joe Biden's job approval rating hit 47% in a newly-released survey — a major boost for the administration as it attempts to reposition its domestic agenda and tackle the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

In the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released on Friday, Biden's approval rating of 47% represented a significant jump from February's survey, when the president's approval was at 39%.

In the March poll, 50% of respondents disapproved of Biden's job performance, compared to 55% in February.

In the poll released Friday, Biden appears to have made up ground with Independents, a key group of voters that helped send him to The White House but whose perception of the president soured after the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, rising inflation throughout 2021, and setbacks related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The president's latest polling number also returns him close to his public standing from last August when his job approval sat at 49%.

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics report released on Friday revealed that a robust 678,000 jobs were created in February 2022 — with the unemployment rate falling from 4% to 3.8% — rising inflation has kept many Americans from feeling secure about the state of the economy.

In the latest poll, 45% of respondents approved of Biden's handling of the economy, versus 53% of those polled who disapproved.

The most recent economic approval numbers reflect, however, still reflect an uptick in support of his handling of the economy. In February 2022, only 36% of respondents approved of the administration's work on this issue, while 58% disapproved.

When asked about Biden's handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, voters approved of the president by a 52%-44% — a major improvement from the president's 34% approval rating on the issue in February.

Last month, half of the respondents disapproved of Biden's response to the conflict.

Since then, Biden has reiterated that he would not send US troops to fight in the conflict and has refrained from declaring a no-fly zone across Ukraine's airspace. However, the administration has imposed crippling sanctions on Moscow, which has tanked the ruble and caused economic woes in Russia.

An overwhelming 83% of respondents indicated that they supported the economic sanctions against Russia, which included 88% of Democrats, 79% of Republicans, and 83% of independents.

As more localities across the country continue to drop or modify their COVID-19 vaccine policies for indoor dining and recreation, Biden has seen his slightly negative standing on the issue — 49% disapproved in a poll last month — morph into solid support, 55% approval in the latest survey.

The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll was conducted on March 1 and March 2 after Biden's State of the Union address, with a sample of 1,322 adults weighted to correlate to the country's demographic makeup.

The margin of error for the overall sample was 3.8 percentage points.