President Joe Biden appears to be on the back foot, with one of the latest poll results confirming that he is trailing his predecessor Donald Trump.
What Happened: Biden trails Trump by four percentage points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Wall Street Journal’s latest poll found. The findings are based on a survey of 1,500 registered voters conducted between Nov. 29 and Dec. 4.
About 47% of the respondents chose Trump as opposed to the 43% who sided with Biden. This is the first time Trump has taken a lead over Biden in the Wall Street Journal’s survey, which has data dating back to Nov. 2021.
Trump’s lead over Biden widened by six percentage points, to 37%, when Robert Kennedy Jr., Joe Manchin, Cornel West, Jill Stein and Lars Mapstead were added as options. The latter group of third-party and independent candidates took the combined support of 17% of the voters, while 14% of voters said they were undecided.
Because voters in the undecided camp leaned toward the Democratic party in other survey questions, they could still be drawn into the Biden camp a year from now, the report said.
Incidentally, a separate poll done by Morning Consult showed that both Biden and Trump were tied in a dead heat, with both backed by 43% of the respondents.
What’s Ailing Biden: Biden’s job approval rating hit a low of 37% , with 61% seeing his overall image in an unfavorable light. More than 50% view Bidenomics, a term used to refer to the president’s economic policy, unfavorably as opposed to less than 30% who view it positively.
Only 23% said Biden’s policies benefited them as opposed to 53% who said they were hurt by the president’s agenda. Trump, however, scored better on that front, with about half of the voters saying his policies helped them personally. The percentage of respondents who said they were hurt by Trump’s policies during his tenure was a more modest 37%.
On specific issues such as abortion, Biden had an upper hand over Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported. That said, young voters, who are a key demographic for Democrats, have expressed anxiety about inflation. Young adults, along with Black and Latinx voters, are “feeling economically stressed and challenged right now and they are not showing enthusiasm in the way they were turning out in 2020,” Democratic pollster Michael Bocian said.
Bocian, along with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, conducted the survey on behalf of the Wall Street Journal.
The poll also found that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, though trailing behind Trump by a wide margin in the Republican primary race, came on top when pitted against Biden in a hypothetical one-on-one race. She led Biden by 17 points with a commanding 51% of support. Several corporate financiers have thrown their weight behind Haley as an alternative to Trump.
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