NEW POLLS FIND: TO CHOOSE THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS
Americans remain decidedly unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch in the 2024 presidential election, a new finds.
Suffolk University has a partnership with USA TODAY and collects polling data on a national level. This survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted between October 19 and October 24, 2022 and is based on live telephone interviews of adults 18 years of age or older, residing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Surveys were administered in English and Spanish. The margin of sampling error for results based on the total sample is +/-3.1 percentage points.
Biden’s position among Democrats has strengthened slightly over the past few months, while Trump’s position among Republicans has weakened slightly, according to intriguing new data.
Both contenders indicated that they intend to announce their campaign after the results of this year’s midterm elections are known, which are only 11 days away.
In a prospective presidential race, Biden leads Trump 46% to 42% – a 4-point margin that mirrors Biden’s 4.2-point defeat of Trump in 2020. That’s the same 4-point margin Biden held over Trump, 45% to 41%, according to the USA TODAY/Suffolk poll taken in July.
Biden’s poor performance improves
64% of voters do not want Biden to run for a second term.
These conclusions are nothing to brag about, but they are slightly better than in the summer, when 69% of respondents against 22% did not want him to run.
Biden’s position among Democrats has improved significantly. 45%-43% now say they want him to run. In July, only 35% of Democrats declared their support for the current president, while 50% sharply criticized.
Trump’s Poor Performance Gets Worse
68% of voters do not want Trump to run for a second term.
Those results have worsened slightly since the summer, when 65% against 28% of voters wanted him to drop another bid for the White House.
Trump’s position among Republicans has fallen, although he is still more popular within his own party than Biden is in his. GOP voters (56-39%) want Trump to run again. That’s a few points down from July, when 60-34% of Republicans declared their support for Trump.
Ratings are rather controversial indicators
Thus, the approval rating for Biden’s work has grown since the summer to 44% approving and 53% disapproving. His position is still down 9 points, but it outperforms his July rating of 39%-56%.
In the new poll, the president’s job-approval rating is 45% against 51%.
That 6-point deficit says absolutely nothing until you compare it to Trump’s approval rating, which is 35% to 58%. Or take a comparison with the other branches of government: The president’s favorable rating is slightly higher than that for the Supreme Court, at 41%, and it swamps that of the U.S. Congress, at 27%.
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Main sources: USA TODAY, NBC News, Suffolk University https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/10/28/biden-trump-rematch-2024-suffolk-poll/10596438002/
