Donald Trump advances and beats Joe Biden in a poll ahead of the November elections

US President Joe Biden is struggling to overcome the crisis doubts about his leadership within his own party and widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the nation, leaving him behind Donald J. Trump just as his general election race is about to begin, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

-Eight months before the end of the November elections, Biden’s 43% support trails Trump’s 48%. in the National Survey of Registered Voters.

Only one in four voters believes the country is going in the right direction. Those who believe Biden’s policies have hurt them personally are more than double those who believe they have helped them. Most voters think the economy is in bad shape.

And the share of voters who strongly disapprove of the way Biden has handled his job reached 47%, higher than that found by Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency.

Warnings for the head of the White House

The investigation offers a number of warning signs for the president in this regard weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, black and Latino voters. So far it has been Trump who has unified the party better than him, even in the midst of the ongoing primary race.

Iden dominated the early states in the primaries with only nominal opposition. But the survey proved it Democrats remain deeply divided on the prospect of Biden, the 81-year-old chief executive, returning to lead the party again.

Trump’s ability to consolidate the Republican base better than Biden unified his own party’s base is clearly on display in the current thinking of 2020 voters.

Trump is winning over 97% of those who say they voted for him four years ago, and virtually none of his former supporters have said they will vote for Biden. By contrast, Biden is winning only 83% of his 2020 voters, and 10% say they support Trump.

Overall, voters viewed Trump’s policies much more favorably than Biden’s in the Times/Siena poll.

“It’s going to be a very difficult decision; I’m seriously considering not voting,” said Mamta Misra, 57, a Democrat and economics professor in Lafayette, Louisiana, who voted for Biden in 2020. “Trump voters are leaving.” No matter what happens. It will be a bad situation for the Democrats. I don’t know why they don’t think of someone else.”

Trump’s five-point lead in the poll, conducted in late February, is slightly larger than the Times/Siena’s latest national survey of registered voters in December. Among likely voters, Trump currently leads by four percentage points.

Black support for Biden is declining

In last year’s poll, Trump led by two points among registered voters and Biden by two points among the expected likely electorate. One of the starkest findings for Biden in the new poll is that the historic advantage Democrats have had over working-class voters of color who didn’t attend college continues to erode.

According to polls, Biden won 72% of those voters in 2020, giving him a nearly 50-point lead over Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Biden leading only narrowly among nonwhite voters who didn’t graduate from college: 47% to 41%.

In the survey, a gap in enthusiasm between the two parties repeatedly emerges: only 23% of Democratic primary voters said they were enthusiastic about Biden, half of Republicans said they were enthusiastic about Trump. Significantly more Democrats said they were dissatisfied or angry that Biden was the party leader (32%) than Republicans who said the same about Trump (18%).

Both Trump and Biden are unpopular. Trump earned a weak 44% favorable rating; Biden fared even worse, with 38%. Among the 19% of voters who said they disapproved of the two potential candidates (an unusually large group in 2024 that pollsters and political strategists sometimes call “double enemies”), Biden actually led Trump, with 45% against 33.

The candidate who defeated these “double enemies” won the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Discontent

For now, however, discontent with the state of the country is clearly a drag on Biden’s prospects. Two-thirds of the country believes the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

The percentage of voters who believe the nation is on the right path remains a depressingly small minority: 24%. However, even that figure represents a notable improvement from the days of peak inflation in the summer of 2022, when only 13% of voters believed the nation was headed in the right direction.

“If we can get Trump to last another four years, we’ll improve the economy a little bit,” said Oscar Rivera, a 39-year-old independent voter who owns a roofing business in Rochester, New York.

Overall, voters viewed Trump’s policies much more favorably than Biden’s. About 40% of voters said Trump’s policies helped them personally, compared to just 18% who said the same about Biden’s.

Only 12% of independent voters like Rivera said Biden’s policies helped them personally, compared to 43% who said his policies hurt them.

The Times/Siena poll revealed how Trump managed to penetrate the most traditional Democratic electoral districts while holding firm among Republican groups.

The gender gap, for example, no longer benefits Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Biden four years ago, are now evenly divided, while men gave Trump a nine-point lead. The poll showed Trump outperforming Biden among Latinos, and Biden’s share of the black vote is also shrinking.

Of course, there are unpredictable factors in a race in which the Republican front-runner faces four indictments, 91 felony charges and a criminal trial set to begin in late March in the New York State Supreme Court.

The investigation proved it 53% of voters currently believe Trump has committed serious federal crimes, up from 58% in December. But looked at another way, Trump’s current advantage over Biden is based on the fact that a significant number of voters believe he is a criminal.

Meanwhile, the country remains divided on some of its thorniest national and international issues.

Nikki Haley, Trump’s Republican rival, who has claimed she will lose in November, leads Biden by double the margin of the former president: a hypothetical 45% to 35%. But she struggled to gain ground in the primaries and the poll predicts crushing losses on Super Tuesday next week, with 77% of Republican primary voters choosing Trump over him.

Fountain: The New York Times