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Joe Biden’s hopes of defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 US election suffered a blow after a new round of polling showed the president trailing his Republican rival in most of the crucial swing-state races.
According to a New York Times/Siena survey published on Monday, Trump leads Biden among probable voters in every swing state except for Michigan, and is ahead of the US president among registered voters in all swing states except Wisconsin.
The grim data for Biden is likely to increase the concern among Democrats about the president’s re-election prospects, with less than six months to go before election day.
“As far as I can tell, [the Biden campaign] are doing everything they need to do on the messaging front, they’re working social media very well, and they’re doing events in the respective states. But it’s just not sticking,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former congressional aide. “That’s what I find frustrating, disturbing, and a little bit scary,” he said.
The latest NYT/Siena poll comes a day after the FT-Michigan Ross survey showed US voters were growing more troubled by inflation again and still rate Trump higher than Biden on the economy.
The NYT/Siena poll showed Biden losing by significant margins to Trump in the western and southern swing states including Nevada, Arizona and Georgia that he won in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the industrial states that he must win to remain in the White House — the contest is closer but still on a knife edge.
Geoff Garin, one of the Biden campaign’s pollsters, said that it would be a “mistake” to draw broad conclusions about the race from one survey and said Biden was “up and gaining” in other polls.
“The reality is that many voters are not paying close attention to the election and have not started making up their minds — a dynamic also reflected in today’s poll. These voters will decide this election and only the Biden campaign is doing the work to win them over,” Garin said in a statement.
The FiveThirtyEight national polling average shows Trump leading Biden by 0.9 percentage points, a narrower gap than in March, suggesting the president has made gains recently, while his rival has been in a New York court for his “hush money” trial. In most crucial battleground states, Trump’s lead has shrunk even accounting for the NYT/Siena poll, according to FiveThirtyEight.
But Biden has still failed to overtake Trump let alone open up a commanding lead in those races, and the NYT/Siena poll showed an erosion of support for Biden among the young voters and people of colour who helped propel him to victory over Trump in 2020.
Meanwhile, Trump had strong advantages over Biden when respondents were asked who they would trust more in handling the economy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while Biden led on abortion.
“What I find most troubling is the strength that Trump demonstrates on issue after issue even on things that objectively he failed at,” said Manley, the Democratic strategist.
Trump welcomed the poll when he spoke outside the courtroom in New York on Monday.
“The New York Times just came out with a poll that shows us leading everywhere by a lot. This is a cover story, and I think you all will find it very interesting.”
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