AP Photo/Susan Walsh; AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied neck and neck, each getting 43 percent of likely voters, according to a new poll of the 2024 race conducted by New York Times/Siena.
While the “hypothetical rematch,” as the article calls it, puts Biden in a tough position if he faces Trump in a rematch of 2020, it did show some increasing support for the sitting president among wary Democrats:
Mr. Biden has recovered significantly from last summer. At the time, Democratic grumbling about his likely re-election bid had mounted, and a Times/Siena poll found that 64 percent of Democrats said they did not want the party to renominate him — including 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30. Now only half of all Democrats said they did not want Mr. Biden to be the nominee in 2024.
This still puts him up against a former president who was twice impeached, twice indicted, and is the target of a third investigation. But while Trump has accrued a record as a president, so has Biden, and voters who are unhappy with the state of the economy or feel Biden hasn’t delivered might find themselves voting for the lesser of two evils.
According to the Times:
Melody Marquess, 54: “I’m sorry, but both of them, to me, are too old. Joe Biden to me seems less mentally capable, age-wise. But Trump is just evil. He’s done horrible things.”
Ashlyn Cowan, 27: “You have Trump that has shown characteristics that I am staunchly against, and Biden just not being the greatest person to do the job. Ultimately, Biden is not going to harm the country as much as I believe Trump would.”
John Wittman, 42: “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal.” … A Republican, he said that even though he believed Mr. Biden’s economic stewardship had hurt the country, “I will vote for anyone on the planet that seems halfway capable of doing the job, including Joe Biden, over Donald Trump.”
And on top of this, Biden’s approval ratings for an incumbent are bad, “historically” bad — even as his approval slowly starts to climb back:
Mr. Biden’s approval rating of 39 percent is historically poor for an incumbent president seeking re-election, but it has risen from 33 percent last July. The latest poll found that 23 percent of registered voters thought the country was on the right track — a low number for Mr. Biden, but better than the 13 percent of Americans who believed the same a year ago. More Americans than a year ago now think the economy is in excellent or good shape: 20 percent, compared with 10 percent in 2022.
Read the poll crosstabs here.
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