Trump leads in five critical states as voters destroy Biden, Times/Siena Poll shows
Trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six key battleground states a year before the 2024 election, President Biden faces massive doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls from The New York Times and Siena College discovered this.
The results show Biden losing to Trump, his most likely Republican rival, by a margin of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead alone in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll showed.
In the six battleground states — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president is trailing by an average of 48 to 44 percent.
Dissatisfaction pulses in the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have hurt them personally. The survey also shows the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that supported Mr. Biden by crushing margins in 2020 are now much more hotly contested, as two-thirds of the electorate see the country moving in the wrong direction.
Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by just one percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is in the single digits and his lead in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s lead in rural areas. And while women still preferred Biden, men preferred Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had driven so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a stronghold for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support for Mr. Trump in these states, a level unheard of for a Republican in modern presidential politics.
Add it all up and Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden had a two-point lead in Wisconsin.
In a notable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the further Mr. Biden fell behind, leading only in the whitest of the six.
According to the poll, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are both deeply — and equally — unpopular. But voters who overwhelmingly said the nation was on the wrong track are taking out their frustrations on the president.
“The world is falling apart under Biden,” said Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, 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 role model for the country. But at least I think Trump understands him.”
Mr Biden still has a year to turn the situation around. Economic indicators have risen even if voters disagree. Mr. Trump remains polarizing. And Mr. Biden’s well-financed campaign will aim to shore up his demographic weaknesses. 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 Mr. Biden will start next year with a deficit, even though Mr. Trump has been indicted on criminal charges four times and faces trial in 2024. If the poll results were the same next November, Mr Trump would be poised to win more than 300 Electoral College votes, well above the 270 needed to capture the White House.
Another ominous sign for Democrats is that voters at all income levels felt that Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them personally, while they appreciated Mr. Trump’s policies for helping them. The results were mirror images: 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 stands out as a glaring liability. An overwhelming 71 percent said he was “too old” to be an effective president — a view shared by every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a notable 54 percent of Biden’s own supporters.
In contrast, only 19 percent of supporters of Trump, who is 77, considered him too old, as did 39 percent of the electorate overall.
Concerns about the president’s increasing age and mental acuity — 62 percent also said Mr. Biden does not have the “mental acuity” to be effective — are just the beginning of an extensive series of Biden weaknesses in the survey results.
Voters said by a margin of 59 percent to 37 percent that they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy, the widest gap of any issue. Preference for Mr. Trump on the economic front extended across the electorate, among men and women, with and without a college degree, in every age range and at every income level.
That result is especially problematic for Mr. Biden because nearly twice as many voters said economic issues would determine their vote in 2024, compared to social issues, such as abortion or guns. And those economic voters favored Trump by a landslide from 60 percent to 32 percent.
The findings come as Biden’s campaign spent millions of dollars on ads to promote his record, and as the president continues to tour the country bragging about the state of the economy. “Folks, Bidenomics is just another way to express the American dream!” Mr. Biden said he was traveling to Minnesota on Wednesday.
Voters clearly disagree. Only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent.
Voters under 30 — a group that voted strongly for Biden in 2020 — said they trusted Trump more on the economy, by an extraordinary margin of 28 percentage points after years of inflation and now high interest rates that have made mortgages much less affordable. Less than one percent of respondents under 30 rated the current economy as excellent, including zero 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 packs drinks in Albany, Georgia. “You can’t be worse than Trump. But as the years go by, things happen with inflation, the war in Ukraine, recently Israel, and I don’t think our borders are secure at all.”
Now Mr. Henry plans to support Mr. Trump.
“I don’t see anything he’s done to benefit us,” said Patricia Flores, 39, of Reno, Nev., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but will not support him again in 2024.
In 2020, Biden’s path to victory included rebuilding the so-called blue wall in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, then expanding the map in the diversifying Sun Belt states of Arizona and Georgia.
The poll shows Biden is significantly stronger in the industrial Northern states than in the more diverse Sun Belt.
And its vulnerabilities extend across a wide range of issues.
Voters chose 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 percent majority supported more economic and military aid to Ukraine — consistent with Biden’s policies — that did not appear to benefit the president when it comes to broader questions about his fitness to conduct foreign affairs.
“I don’t think he’s the right guy to take on these other world leaders who don’t respect him or are afraid of 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 Trump by 62 percent over 33 percent; women favored Mr. Biden 47 to 46 percent.
Mr. Biden’s strongest issue was abortion, with voters trusting him over Mr. Trump by nine percentage points. Mr. Biden also retained voters’ confidence by an even narrower three-point margin over Mr. Trump in the more amorphous handling of “democracy.”
Mr. Biden has survived poor results in the polls before. In October 2022, ahead of the midterm elections, the president’s approval rating was almost the same as it is today. His party still managed to lose fewer seats in the House of Representatives than expected and gain one seat in the Senate, partly by portraying Republican candidates as extremists.
Today, the extent to which voters are turning away from the personality and bombast of Trump — who for years has been the glue that has held together a fractious Democratic coalition — appears to have waned. Only 46 percent of voters said Mr. Biden had the right temperament to be president, barely more than the 43 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump. That said, Mr. Trump will be in more of the spotlight in 2024, including his criminal trials, a growing presence that could remind voters why they were turned off 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 are combined, the margin of 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 Baker, Alyce McFadden And Ruth Igielnik reporting contributed.