Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in six key states

Trump’s lead in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election is propelled by voter dissatisfaction with the national economy and deep doubts about Biden’s capabilities.

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election, propelled by broad voter dissatisfaction with the national economy and deep doubts about Biden’s capabilities and job performance, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.

The poll of the election’s main battlegrounds shows Trump holding leads of between 2 and 8 percentage points in six states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – on a test ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Mr Trump holds similar leads when voters are asked to choose only between him and Mr Biden.

The one outlier is Wisconsin, where Mr Biden leads by 3 points on the multiple-candidate ballot, and where the two candidates are tied in a head-to-head matchup.

Overall, the poll shows substantial unhappiness with Mr Biden among voters who will have the most influence in the outcome of the election, as expanded one-party dominance in states has left just a few as politically competitive.

Mr Biden pulled off a remarkable feat in 2020, winning three states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – in the industrial north, which had been slipping from Democrats’ grasp and had backed Mr Trump in 2016. He won by even narrower margins in Georgia and Arizona, two fast-diversifying states in the south and southwest where Democrats had long-unfulfilled hopes of victory.

Two more states are also viewed as in play: Nevada, which Mr Biden won but where Democratic margins have narrowed, and North Carolina, the state that backed Mr Trump by the slimmest margin in 2020.

Mr Trump departs after speaking during a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP

Both campaigns will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and turnout efforts in these seven states, which account for 93 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win. The Journal will focus on these swing states in a series of stories over the coming months.

In every state in the survey, negative views of the president’s job performance outweigh positive views by 16 percentage points or more, with the gap topping 20 points in four states. By contrast, Mr Trump earns an unfavourable job review for his time in the White House in only a single state – Arizona – where negative marks outweigh positive ones by 1 percentage point.

Both candidates carry a tarnished image into the race, but voters view Mr Biden more unfavourably. Asked to choose which candidate has the better physical and mental fitness to handle the White House, 48pc pick Mr Trump and 28pc say Mr Biden. One result is that Mr Biden is having a harder time holding together his 2020 coalition, with declining support among black, Hispanic and young voters.

The survey, conducted March 17-24, included 4200 voters reached by phone and text – 600 voters in each of the seven states. The margin of error was plus or minus 1.5 percentage points for the full sample and 4 points for results in individual states.

For a president struggling to regain ground with voters, the poll offers several possibilities. Mr Trump holds double-digit leads in every state when voters are asked who can best handle the economy, inflation and immigration, but Mr Biden is viewed as the preferable candidate on abortion, an issue that some voters consider make-or-break in deciding their candidate choice. The Biden campaign is expected to stress Mr Trump’s role in nominating Supreme Court justices who ended federal abortion rights and opened the path to state-level restrictions.

Another opportunity for Mr Biden is that the electorate is highly unsettled. About one-quarter of voters are either undecided or back third-party and independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist, a likely signal that many voters haven’t decided on a candidate and could ultimately swing behind the president.

“Don’t look at these people as excited by third-party candidates … They are saying, ‘I’m toying with some other options because I don’t like the options I’ve been given,’” said Michael Bocian, a Democratic pollster who conducted the survey along with the firm of Tony Fabrizio, a Republican. Past polling and election results suggest that most of these voters will back a major-party nominee as they hear more from the candidates.

Voters could also be influenced by developments such as the April 15 start of Mr Trump’s trial in New York on felony hush-money charges, the first of what could be multiple criminal trials that the former president faces. Previous Journal polling and surveys of GOP primary voters have found some Trump supporters saying they would change their votes if he was convicted of a felony. Mr Trump has denied wrongdoing.

The latest poll finds that voters in the swing states are more focused on the economy than are voters nationwide. Some 35pc cite the economy and inflation as the issues most important to their vote, compared with 19pc in the Journal’s national survey in February. They are also a bit more pessimistic about it. Only 25pc say the economy has gotten better in the past two years, compared with 31pc in the national poll.

But the survey also found an unusual dynamic: Voters say the national economy is in bad shape but conditions in their home states are generally good.

In North Carolina, for example, voters describe the national economy in negative rather than positive terms by 66pc to 33pc. Yet those numbers are reversed when asked to rate the state’s economy. In Wisconsin, negative views of the national economy outweigh positive ones by 16 points, while positive views of the state economy outweigh negative ones by 17 points.

Similarly, voters in the survey view their own finances in far less dire terms than the economic prospects of Americans more broadly. Some 68pc in the survey said it was becoming harder for the average person to get ahead, compared with 26pc who said it was getting easier – a 42-point gap. But 46pc said their own finances were moving in the right direction, just 3 points lower than those who said their finances were going in the wrong direction.

Mr Fabrizio, the Republican pollster, said a main finding of the poll was that battleground-state voters feel a pervasive sense of “economic malaise … like a wet blanket that sits over everything”, which has weighed down views of the president’s performance. Mr Fabrizio, who worked for a pro-Trump super PAC at the time the survey was conducted, has since joined the Trump campaign.

Mr Bocian said it was a problem for Mr Biden that he isn’t getting credit for positive feelings about battleground-state economies.

“Whether they can take advantage of that opportunity – not make people feel everything’s going great, but better than they’re currently feeling – I think is a big challenge in front of them,” he said.

In another challenge for Mr Biden, the survey found signs that he has yet to consolidate the winning coalition that backed him in 2020. Across the seven states, Mr Biden is winning 68pc of black voters, as well as 48pc of Hispanic voters and 50pc of voters under age 30 on the two-candidate ballot.

Those support levels are almost identical to the backing Mr Biden had in the Journal’s February poll of the national voter pool and are far weaker than what he won in 2020. Nationwide, Mr Biden that year carried 91pc of Black voters, 63pc of Hispanic voters and 61pc of voters under age 30, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate that year.

Corrine Armstrong, 43, a manager in the healthcare sector from Savannah, Georgia, remains uncommitted to Mr Biden after backing him in 2020. She has ruled out voting for Mr Trump. “Being an African-American and a woman, I think he spews a lot of hatred, and I don’t see good coming from him,” she said. And she said her personal finances are fine. She just feels disappointed in the president.

Ms Armstrong said she wished that Mr Biden had pressed for tougher gun-control regulations and that he had given Vice-President Kamala Harris a more prominent role. “I just feel like his age and everything behind that – he’s just not as sharp as I’d like him to be for a president making bigger decisions,” she said.

Quinn Cory, 32, of Milwaukee, is also remaining uncommitted after backing Biden last time. She said she wouldn’t vote for Trump, but she thinks Biden should be doing more to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to rein in what she sees as price-gouging by big corporations.

“I definitely historically vote Democratic, but I think he needs to demonstrate some action in order for me to do that,” said Cory, who recently left an administrative job in the public sector. She added: “I do feel apathetic about his presidency and hope he can do some things to win my vote.”

By contrast, Mark Erichsen, 67, a retired tax accountant in Farmington Hills, Michigan, has ruled out backing Mr Biden, saying the president has failed to stop illegal immigration and is misguided in pushing for electric vehicles, among other policies.

“Trump – he’s not somebody you’re going to point to and say, ‘That’s how you should live your life.’ But his policies made sense,’” said Mr Erichsen, who has voted for candidates from both parties. He said he supported Mr Trump’s efforts to stop illegal immigration, boost energy extraction and limit China’s role in the US economy.

While Mr Trump leads in most swing states, the survey found that the political terrain varied among them. Voters in Nevada were the least motivated to cast ballots this year, with 62pc rating themselves as highly motivated, compared with 69pc across the seven states. Michigan voters were the most dissatisfied with their state’s economy. Voters in Arizona were most worried about immigration and border security, with 80pc saying that developments were headed in the wrong direction, compared with 74pc in the survey overall.

The Wall Street Journal