Biden has narrowed Trump’s lead in key battleground states following a poor debate performance and growing calls for him to resign, the report said. New Research.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll released Saturday showed Biden leading Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the poll showed the incumbent president’s lead was within the margin of error.
Overall, the poll found Trump leading Biden in seven states by just 2 percentage points (47 percent to 45 percent), the closest Biden has come to overtaking Trump since Bloomberg began polling the seven states last October.
The poll also showed that Biden has narrowed his lead among independents, with Trump and Biden tied at 40% in approval ratings. In the previous poll, former President Biden had led the incumbent president 44% to 36%.
The widest gap between the party’s presumptive candidates was in Biden’s home battleground state of Pennsylvania, where the poll found Trump received 51 percent of the support of Keystone State voters compared with Biden’s 44 percent.
It was Bloomberg’s first poll since the June 28 debate, moderated by CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The president’s lackluster onstage performance, marked by stuttering and a raspy voice, has raised concerns among Democrats about whether he can beat Trump in the November debate or hang on to the presidency for another four years.
“While the first 2024 presidential debate appears to have unsettled Democratic leaders, Bloomberg News’ battleground state polls suggest it has done little to change the underlying dynamics of the race,” said Eli Yokeley, US political consultant at Morning Consult. Written together Announcement of opinion poll.
Respondents generally felt that Trump performed better in the debates, with more than half saying he won, while only 13% said Biden was the winner. Fewer than one in five respondents thought Biden was a more consistent, mentally healthy or advantageous participant.
About 20% of those surveyed said the president is mentally healthy, and nearly half said the same about Trump. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said Biden, at 81, is too old to be president, while 8% said Trump, at 78, is too old.
The Bloomberg poll stands in contrast to recently released national surveys, including a highly anticipated New York Times/Siena College poll that showed the lead had widened after the debate, giving Trump a 6-point lead, up from 3 points last week. A subsequent Wall Street Journal poll also showed Biden trailing the former president by 6 points.
The Hill/Decision Desk polling index gives Trump a slight lead of just over 1 percentage point with 44.2% support to Biden’s 43.1%.
Since the debate, a growing number of Democrats have called for Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee and be replaced by someone new.
About 40% of those surveyed said Biden should continue campaigning, while 55% said he should withdraw. About 30% of likely Democratic voters said he should withdraw from the campaign, according to the survey.
Among potential successors, support for Vice President Harris was strongest, with 42% in favor of her replacing Biden, but the poll also showed that more than half of voters would oppose such a move.
A third of survey respondents said they would support California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) as his successor, while 36 percent said they would support the candidacy of Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.).
About half of respondents said Trump should continue campaigning, while 44% said he should withdraw. Fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans think the former president should withdraw from the race, according to the poll.
Since the debate, Biden has repeatedly insisted he has no plans to resign.
The poll is also the first conducted by Bloomberg/Morning Consult since Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money case. Roughly 62% of voters say the former president is dangerous following his conviction, up from 59% in a February poll.
The Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll was conducted July 1-5 among 4,902 voters in seven battleground states and has a margin of error of 1 percentage point.
