More voters in five key swing states say that they would vote for former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, according to New York Times/Siena College polls released on Sunday.
Trump, the unrivalled front-runner in the Republican primary to take on Biden, leads 52% to 41% in Nevada, 49% to 43% in Georgia, 49% to 44% in Arizona, 48% to 43% in Michigan, and 48% to 44% in Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin is the only swing state that The New York Times and Siena College polled where Biden has the edge, by 47% to 45%.
The results of the polls, which were conducted from October 22 to November 3, are perhaps the most alarming sign yet for Democrats that Biden faces an uphill battle in his bid for a second term.
If Trump were to win by the margins in the surveys published Sunday, he would obtain more than 300 electoral college votes and easily win the presidential election.
Biden’s campaign notes that a Gallup poll predicted that former President Barack Obama would lose a year before his 2012 reelection, and that polling predicted a much worse performance for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections than they ended up delivering.
“Coming off those historic midterms, President Biden’s campaign is hard at work reaching and mobilising our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and MAGA Republicans’ unpopular extremism,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Muñoz said in a statement. “We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”
The two biggest reasons why voters are abandoning Biden in the battleground states that delivered him the presidency in 2020 are concerns about his age and mental acuity, and dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, according to the polls.
By a margin of 59% to 37%, voters across the six states said that they “trust” Trump to do a better job than Biden managing the economy.
Those voters believe that Biden is “too old” to be president by an even bigger margin: 71% to 27%. Just 39% of those voters believe Trump is “too old,” compared to 59% who do not.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal expressed concern about the poll results, but stood by Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
“I was concerned before these polls, and I’m concerned now. These presidential races over the last couple of terms have been very tight,” he said. “No one is going to have a runaway election here. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, concentration, resources. And so we have our work cut out for us.”