NEW YORK, Nov 07 (APP): Former US President Donald Trump, a Republican, holds notable leads over President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in five key swing American states, a year ahead of presidential elections, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll.
Voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada all prefer Trump, pollsters found. Of the six states surveyed, Biden only leads in Wisconsin. Biden won all six states in the 2020 presidential election.
The Times and Siena polled about 600 registered voters in each of the six states. Trump held the largest lead in Nevada, where 52% of respondents preferred him, to only 41% for Biden.
The poll was conducted between October 22 and November 3, and the margin of error was between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points in each state.
Sunday’s poll painted a much darker picture for Biden than a previous NYT/Siena poll published in August. That nationwide poll showed the two-party frontrunners neck and neck with 43% support.
But if Trump is able to repeat Sunday’s poll results at the ballot box in one year, he would likely cruise to a second four-year term in the White House, analysts said. On average, Biden trails in the six battleground states by 48% to 44%.
Neither Biden nor Trump is expected to face much of a primary challenge. Trump has dominated Republican polls to such a degree that he hasn’t even bothered to show up for debates, despite facing dozens of criminal charges in four different cases.
But Trump did attend the Republican Party’s Freedom Summit on Saturday in Kissimmee, a city in Florida, taking the fight to the state Governor, Ron DeSantis, in his home state.
“We’re going to win the Florida primary for the third straight time,” Trump told the cheering crowd.
Trump also announced a slate of new endorsements from Florida politicians, who flipped from DeSantis.
While Trump was allowed to give the event’s closing speech, DeSantis spoke earlier, in the afternoon. He attempted to focus on his conservative accomplishments as governor.
“Florida has shown the way forward for the Republican Party,” he said. “No state has done more to beat the left at the institutional level than we have in the state of Florida.”
Only former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, speaking even before DeSantis, openly criticized Trump in his speech. He was met with a chorus of boos.
“Your anger against the truth is reprehensible,” he told the crowd, who met him with cries of “Go back to New Jersey!”
Concerns among Democrats about Biden’s steady fall in polls are growing significantly, when 34% of battleground state voters said he was too old (80) to be president—71% now say he’s too old, while 62% say he does not have the mental sharpness to be president, up from 45% in 2020.
Biden is also losing support among demographics that typically back Democrats: voters under 30 favor him by just one point, and they trust Trump more to handle the economy by a 28-point margin, while Biden’s advantage among nonwhite voters under 45 has declined from a 39-point lead over Trump in 2020 to six points now.
