A year before the 2024 election, President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction with his management of the economy and many other problems. new polls from the New York Times and Siena College to have found.
The results show that Mr. Biden lost to Mr. Trump, his most likely Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania . Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, according to the poll.
Across the six battlegrounds – all of which Mr. Biden won in 2020 – the president is averaging 48 to 44 percent.
Discontent pulses throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally harmed them. The survey also reveals how the multiracial, multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that supported Mr. Biden by overwhelming margins in 2020 are now much more contested, as two-thirds of the electorate see the country heading in the wrong direction.
Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by just a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is in the single digits, and his advantage in urban areas is half that of Mr. Trump in rural areas. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as much, negating the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — now register 22% support for Mr. Trump in these states, a level never before seen in presidential politics for a modern-day Republican.
Adding it all up, Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden held a 2-point lead in Wisconsin.
In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment Between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the further Mr. Biden lagged, and he was ahead only in the whitest of the six.
Mr. Biden and Mr. 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 their frustrations out on the president.
“The world is falling apart under Biden,” said Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist in Bloomsburg, Pa., who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 but now supports Mr. Trump, albeit with some reservations. “I would much rather see someone who I think can be a positive and role model leader for the country. But at least I think Trump has intelligence.”
Mr. Biden still has a year to turn things around. Economic indicators are rising even if voters don’t approve of them. Mr. Trump remains polarizing. And Mr. Biden’s well-financed campaign will aim to address his demographic weaknesses. The president’s advisers have repeatedly stressed that Democrats managed to limit the party’s losses in 2022, despite Mr. Biden’s poor approval ratings at the time.
Still, the survey shows how Mr. Biden begins next year with a deficit, even though Mr. Trump has been indicted four times on criminal charges and will face trial in 2024. If the poll results were the same in November Next, Mr. Trump would be on pace to win more than 300 Electoral College votes, well above the 270 needed to take the White House.
Another worrying sign for Democrats is that voters of all income levels felt that Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them personally, while they gave credit to Mr. Trump’s policies for helping them. The results were the opposite: Voters gave Mr. Trump a 17-point advantage for helping them and Mr. Biden an 18-point disadvantage for hurting them.
For Mr. Biden, who turns 81 later this month, being the oldest president in American history constitutes a glaring handicap. An overwhelming 71% said he was “too old” to be an effective president – a view shared by every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54% of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.
In contrast, only 19% of supporters of Mr. Trump, aged 77, consider him too old, and 39% of the entire electorate.
Concerns about the president’s advanced age and mental acuity — 62% also said Mr. Biden lacks the “mental acuity” to be effective — are just the beginning of a broad set of weaknesses. Biden in survey results.
Voters, by a margin of 59 percent to 37 percent, said they trusted Mr. Trump more than Mr. Biden on the economy, the widest gap of any topic. The preference for Mr. Trump on economic issues spanned the electorate, men and women, college graduates and non-college graduates, across all age groups and income levels.
This result is particularly problematic for Mr. Biden because nearly twice as many voters said economic issues would determine their vote in 2024 compared to social issues, like abortion or guns. And these economic voters favored Mr. Trump by an overwhelming majority of 60 percent to 32 percent..
The results come after Mr. Biden’s campaign released millions of dollars in ads promoting his record and as the president continued to tour the country boasting about the state of the economy. “My friends, bidenomics is just another way of saying the American dream! Mr. Biden said Wednesday during a trip to Minnesota.
Voters clearly disagree. Only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent.
Voters under 30 — a group that voted heavily for Mr. Biden in 2020 — said they trusted Mr. Trump more on the economy by an extraordinary margin of 28 percentage points. after years of inflation and now high interest rates have made mortgages much less affordable. Less than one percent of respondents under 30 rated the current economy as excellent, including no respondents in that age group in three states: Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
“I actually had high hopes for Biden,” said Jahmerry Henry, a 25-year-old who bags alcohol in Albany, Georgia. “You can’t be worse than Trump. But over the years things happen with inflation, war in Ukraine, recently in Israel and I guess our borders are not secure at all.
Now Mr. Henry is considering supporting Mr. Trump.
“I don’t see anything he’s done that benefits us,” said Patricia Flores, 39, of Reno, Nevada, who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but will no longer support him in 2024.
In 2020, Mr. Biden’s path to victory involved rebuilding the so-called blue wall in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, then expanding the map in states diverse businesses in the Sun Belt of Arizona and Georgia.
The poll shows Mr. Biden is significantly stronger in northern industrial states than in the more diverse Sun Belt.
And its vulnerabilities extend to a wide range of problems.
Voters favored Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden on immigration by 12 points, on national security by 12 points and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 11 points. And while a 58% majority favors more economic and military aid to Ukraine — consistent with Mr. Biden’s policies — it does not appear to benefit the president on broader questions of fitness to manage foreign affairs.
“I don’t think he’s the right person to take on these other world leaders who don’t respect or fear him,” said Travis Waterman, 33, who worked in home restoration in Phoenix. He voted for Mr Biden in 2020, but now considers him “weak” and prefers Mr Trump.
The gender gap in national security was enormous. Men preferred Mr. Trump 62 percent to 33 percent; women preferred Mr. Biden 47 to 46 percent.
Mr. Biden’s most important issue was abortion, where voters trusted him by nine percentage points over Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden also maintained voter confidence by an even slimmer three-point margin over Mr. Trump on the more amorphous handling of “democracy.”
Mr. Biden has already survived poor poll results. In fact, in October 2022, as the midterm elections approached, the president’s approval rating was almost the same as it is today. His party still managed to lose fewer seats than expected in the House and gain one in the Senate, in part by portraying Republican candidates as extremists.
Today, the degree to which voters are turned off by Mr. Trump’s personality and pomposity — which were the glue that held together a divided Democratic coalition for years — appears to have diminished. Only 46% of voters said Mr. Biden had the right temperament to be president, barely more than the 43% who said the same of Mr. Trump. That said, Mr. Trump will be in the spotlight more in 2024, including during his criminal trials, a growing presence that could remind voters why they were repelled by him in the first place.
The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted by telephone using live operators from October 22 to November 3, 2023. When all states combined, the margin sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points. The margin of sampling error for each state is between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points. Crosstabs and methodology are available here.
Camille Boulanger, Alyce McFadden And Ruth Igielnik reports contributed.