A new poll shows former President Donald Trump leading Biden by 7 percentage points in Ohio, but the 81-year-old president is losing support among black and younger voters.
Forty-eight percent of voters in the Buckeye State said they plan to vote for Trump in November, compared with 41% who said they will vote for Biden. According to a Marist poll released Tuesday,.
Meanwhile, 5% of voters said they would support independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the polls, and 1% said they would vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver.
Independent Cornel West has the support of less than 1% of Ohio voters, according to the poll, while 4% of voters are undecided.
Trump, 77, outvoted his successor by 8 percentage points in battleground states in 2020 and also beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The latest poll comes as Biden’s support in Ohio has plummeted among black and younger voters.
Just 57% of Black voters say they will vote for the incumbent Democratic president in November’s presidential election, down from 83% in 2020.
A Marist College poll found that Trump received 25% support from black voters, compared with 12% for Kennedy.
The 45th president also leads with young voters in Ohio, with 46% of voters under the age of 35 backing Trump, compared to 37% for Biden and 12% for Kennedy.
A big factor in Trump’s popularity is that 59% of voters in the state believe they were “better off” under a Trump administration than under a Biden administration, including 13% of Democrats, according to a Marist College poll.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they think things are getting better under Biden, including 6% of Republicans.
The poll also showed that Trump’s approval rating in the state was 45% compared to rival Biden’s 36%.
A majority of voters surveyed in the state (45%) said they believed Trump’s conviction in the hush money case was just and that he did nothing illegal.
A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all 34 charges related to his falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments he made to cover up his alleged affair with former porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents said Trump had done something unethical but not illegal, while 24% said he had done nothing wrong.
Ohioans are also divided on the purpose of the trial: Fifty percent of voters say the trial is to uncover the truth, while 49% say it is to harm Trump’s reelection campaign.
But despite Trump’s lead in the presidential election, 50% of voters said they would support Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in the U.S. Senate race, compared with 45% who said they would support his Republican rival, Bernie Moreno.
Ten percent of those who said they would vote for Trump also said they would support Brown, while just 2% of Biden supporters backed Moreno.
“Unlike voting patterns nationwide in 2016 and 2020, Ohio voters are prepared to split their votes between president and the Senate,” said Lee M. Miringoff, president of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.
“Although Ohio’s electoral votes are likely to go to Trump, Ohioans are ready to return Democrat Brown to the United States Senate.”
The poll was conducted June 3-6 with a sample size of 1,137. The margin of error is 3.6 percentage points.
