According to one new poll, the president may lose these five important swing states.
President Biden’s path to reelection could be steep, if new polling data is to be believed. Biden appears to be losing ground among key demographic groups for Democrats and is now trailing Donald Trump in five crucial swing states, per a recent New York Times and Siena College poll. We’re breaking the results and taking a look at what other recent surveys have to say about the 2024 election.
Trump could have the edge in swing states
In a hypothetical head-to-head between the two leading candidates, Trump is leading Biden in five of six battleground states, the NYT/Siena College poll found. Trump’s largest margin is in Nevada, where he’s up 10 percentage points, followed by Georgia (+6); Arizona (+5); Michigan (+5); and Pennsylvania (+4). Biden only leads in Wisconsin by two points, per the poll.
Just three years ago, Biden won all six of those swing states, but polling has consistently shown that the president has slipped in popularity: Voters are concerned about Biden’s age and are pessimistic about his ability to right the economy. According to this poll, 71 percent of Americans said that at 80 he’s “too old” to be effective (just 39 percent felt the same way about Trump, who’s 77). And a lot of people out there seem to feel that another term for Biden would hurt their pocketbooks, per a CBS News poll also out this week: Forty-five percent of Americans believe they’d be “financially better off” if Trump were to win, compared to 18 percent if Biden were to remain in the White House.
Are younger voters turning away from Biden?
In 2020, 59 percent of voters under 30 backed Biden, but it’s not clear he’ll have the youth vote in 2024. According to a Quinnipiac poll last month, the president’s favorability rating among registered voters under 35 years old sat at a dismal 25 percent, while another poll even gave Trump a slight edge among Americans under 30.
The NYT/Siena survey also indicates that Gen Z and millennials have soured on Biden. White voters under 45 — a group that favored Biden in 2020 by five points — swung to Trump in the poll, preferring him by eight points. The shift is even more dramatic among young non-white voters: They favor Biden by six points, but during the last election they gave him a 39-point margin.
Black and Hispanic voters are gravitating toward Trump
The other issue Biden faces is that he seems to be losing the support of Black and Hispanic Americans, two historically reliable Democratic voting blocs. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump is averaging support from 20 percent of Black voters (just 8 percent of Black Americans voted for him in 2020). If those ballots were to materialize for the former president in 2024, he’d be the most popular presidential candidate among Black Americans the GOP’s seen in 50 years. Trump also has an average of 42 percent of Hispanic support, compared to the 36 percent he received last cycle, per the Post.
Despite the worrisome numbers, the president himself doesn’t seem too concerned — a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign told the New York Times that polls do get it wrong, particularly when they’re a full year out from the election. “Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama only for him to win handily a year later,” said spokesman Kevin Munoz. He added, “We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”
