Trump leads in 5 crucial states as voters rip Biden in poll
President Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College has found.
The results show Biden losing to Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of 3 to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by 2 percentage points, the poll found.
Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 percent to 44 percent.
Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction.
Voters younger than 30 favor Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Biden, men preferred Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.
Add it all together, and Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, 6 in Georgia, 5 in Arizona, 5 in Michigan, and 4 in Pennsylvania. Biden held a 2-point edge in Wisconsin.
In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the further Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six.
Biden and Trump are both deeply — and similarly — unpopular, according to the poll. But voters who overwhelmingly said the nation was on the wrong track are taking out their frustrations on the president.
Biden still has a year to turn the situation around. Economic indicators are up even if voters do not agree with them. Trump remains polarizing. And Biden’s well-funded campaign will aim to shore up his demographic weak spots. The president’s advisers have repeatedly noted that Democrats successfully limited the party’s losses in 2022 despite Biden’s poor approval ratings at the time.
Still, the survey shows how Biden begins the next year at a deficit even though Trump has been indicted on criminal charges four times and faces trial in 2024. If the results in the poll were the same next November, Trump would be poised to win more than 300 Electoral College votes, far above the 270 needed to take the White House.
Another ominous sign for Democrats is that voters across all income levels felt that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally, while they credited Trump’s policies for helping them. The results were mirror opposites: Voters gave Trump a 17-point advantage for having helped them and Biden an 18-point disadvantage for having hurt them.
For Biden, who turns 81 later this month, being the oldest president in American history stands out as a glaring liability. An overwhelming 71 percent said he was “too old” to be an effective president — an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including 54 percent of Biden’s own supporters.
In contrast, only 19 percent of supporters of Trump, who is 77, viewed him as too old, and 39 percent of the electorate overall.
Voters, by 59 percent to 37 percent, said they better trusted Trump over Biden on the economy, the largest gap of any issue. The preference for Trump on economic matters spanned the electorate, among both men and women, those with college degrees and those without them, every age range and every income level.