 "Trump leads in 5 critical states, voters blast Biden over economy: Survey")
President Joe Biden is trailing Donald J. 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 three 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, the poll found.
Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 per cent. 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 under 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 fuelled so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Biden — are now registering 22 per cent 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, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four 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 farther 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.
©2023 The New York Times News