Trump leads in several battleground states as many voters blast Biden
President Joe 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, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.
The results show Biden losing to Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of 4 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% to 44%.
Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Biden's policies have 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 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% 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 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.