In new poll, Biden trims Trump’s edge
President Biden has nearly erased Donald Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy, and his age, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College.
Biden and Trump are now virtually tied, with Trump holding a 46 percent to 45 percent edge. That is an improvement for Biden from late February, when Trump had a sturdier 48 percent to 43 percent lead just before he became the presumptive Republican nominee.
Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago. Then, Trump had secured the support of far more of his past voters compared with Biden — 97 percent to 83 percent — but that margin has narrowed. Biden is now winning 89 percent of his 2020 supporters compared with 94 percent for Trump.
The tightening poll results are the latest evidence of a 2024 contest that both campaigns are preparing to be excruciatingly close. The past two presidential elections were decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, and this one could be just as tight. In a nation so evenly divided, even the tiniest of shifts in support could prove decisive.
Beneath the narrowing contest, many of the fundamentals of the race appear largely unchanged.
The share of voters who view the nation as headed in the wrong direction remains a high 64 percent. Almost 80 percent of voters still rate the nation’s economic conditions as fair or poor, including a majority of Democrats. And both Biden and
Trump remain unpopular, for familiar reasons. Most voters think Biden is too old. A majority believe Trump has committed serious federal crimes.
The survey comes just before Trump’s history-making criminal trial in New York City, the first for a former US president. He faces charges related to falsifying records related to a hushmoney payment to a porn actor. The case is one of four involving felony indictments against Trump, but it is the only one so far with a trial set to begin before the election.
Yet, despite the potential for the Republican nominee to face jail time, only 1 in 4 voters said they were paying very close attention to Trump’s legal travails.
The Biden campaign, which has already begun advertising in battleground states, has hoped the reality of a potential second Trump term will snap reluctant Democrats back toward their typical partisan posture. There is some initial evidence of that happening.
In the past month, Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters, even if it still lags behind traditional levels of Democratic support. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women, although he was weaker among men. Younger voters remain a persistent weakness, while older voters provide a source of relative strength for the Democratic president.
The poll’s overall margin of error was 3.3 percent. But the results among subgroups are less statistically reliable because there are fewer respondents in them. Still, this poll showed Biden with his strongest performance among nonwhite voters among the past three Times/Siena surveys since December.
There was one notable shift in the past month. Among voters who are older than 65, the share who view Biden as too old has dropped significantly.