Despite President Joe Biden’s slightly improved approval rating and former president Trump’s mounting legal woes, the pair are locked in a dead heat in a new poll of the hypothetical 2024 matchup released Tuesday.
Should Trump emerge as the Republican nominee despite his ample legal baggage, 43 percent of the electorate would back his general election bid, compared to 43 percent who say they would support the incumbent Biden, the New York Times/Siena College poll found.
The findings are not vastly different from a similar poll conducted by NBC in late June, which found Trump trailing Biden by just two points across six crucial battleground states. Meanwhile, in a potential showdown between Biden and Ron DeSantis, the governor edged out the incumbent president by six points.
“A majority of Americans have deep, deep concerns about Biden’s physical and mental state; Kamala Harris is the least liked Vice President in the poll’s history; and notwithstanding both, Biden/Harris would still beat Trump. All the GOP has to do is avoid Trump, and many of them won’t let him go,” conservative radio talk-show host Erick Erickson wrote on Twitter following the survey.
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A similar chord was echoed by a registered Republican voter who spoke with the Times about previously voting for Biden. “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal,” a 42-year-old from Phoenix, Ariz., told the outlet. “I will vote for anyone on the planet that seems halfway capable of doing the job, including Joe Biden, over Donald Trump.”
The survey also found that Biden’s approval rating among Democratic voters had increased dramatically since last July in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Whereas only 26 percent of Democrats wanted Biden to run for another term this time last year, today that number stands at 45 percent. The improvement surfaced across all demographic cohorts.
Although only 5 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds backed Biden’s renomination in July 2022, it more than tripled in the coming twelve months to 17 percent. In the oldest group polled, 65 and older, his support jumped from 40 percent to 70 percent.