CV NEWS FEED // A recent NBC poll shows President Joe Biden continuing to lose support for his reelection bid and trailing former President Donald Trump by five points.
In addition, Trump is leading among independent voters by nearly 20 percentage points. The poll also shows him leading in the Hispanic vote – a feat unheard of for a Republican presidential candidate.
The poll was conducted from January 26 to January 30. In a general election matchup between Biden and Trump, 47% of respondents indicated they would support Trump while only 42% favored reelecting the struggling incumbent.
Furthermore, 60% of the NBC poll’s respondents disapproved of Biden’s performance as president. Only 37% expressed their approval.
Other recent polls have shown the president’s approval rating to be as low as 33%.
Biden’s three predecessors all had much higher approval ratings in the year they ran for re-election, per NBC polls taken around the same time in their respective election years.
For all presidents, their approval ratings were within three percentage points of the proportion of the vote they attained in November of each election year.
For example, NBC’s early 2020 poll showed Trump with a 46% approval rating. He received 46.8% of the vote in that year’s presidential election.
In 2012, Obama won re-election with 51.1% of the vote, after posting an approval rating of 49% from NBC’s poll at the beginning of the year. In 2004, Bush won a second term with just shy of 51% of the vote. NBC’s poll that year showed his approval rating at 54%.
NBC’s four 2024 polls of the impending Biden-Trump rematch demonstrate that the embattled sitting president’s support has steadily and precipitously declined over the past few months.
The network’s poll in late June 2023 had Biden leading Trump by four points. Its September poll showed the two presidents tied. November’s NBC poll showed Trump in the lead by a two-point margin.
The January NBC poll displayed Trump up by five percentage points. The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote by more than three points was George H.W. Bush in 1988.
“Since 2019, NBC News has .., conducted 16 polls testing a Biden/Trump match-up,” NBC’s Steve Kornacki wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday. “In the ‘20 cycle, Biden led all 12 of them, by margins between 6 and 14 points. This cycle, we’ve conducted 4, with Trump ahead in two of them and tied in another.”
Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5 points – a point and a half less than his lead in any NBC poll for that election cycle.
Trump is leading Hispanic voters by one point, according to the most recent NBC poll. If this trend holds, he will be the first known Republican presidential candidate in history to win the Hispanic/Latino vote.
In comparison, Trump lost the Hispanic vote to Biden by 21 points in 2020, per the Pew Research Center. However, this was a substantially smaller margin than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried the Hispanics over Trump by 38 points.
In 2012, Obama bested Republican challenger Mitt Romney among Hispanics by 44 points.
Among black voters, Biden is leading Trump by 59 points. If this holds, it would be the worst showing among black voters by a Democratic presidential candidate since the 1960s.
In 2020, Biden won the black vote over Trump by 84 points. Similarly, black Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 85 points.
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In the January NBC poll, respondents were also asked “who would do a better job” on six issues. For four of these issues, respondents indicated that Trump would do the better job in a landslide, compared to the unpopular Biden.
The issue on which Trump appeared to be the strongest was immigration, with 57% percent of poll respondents saying Trump would be better at fixing the ongoing border crisis.
Only 22% stated that Biden would be a better pick to tackle the unprecedented and deadly illegal migration epidemic.
Fifty percent of respondents said Trump would be better suited to tackle crime. Only 29% said the same for Biden. Meanwhile, 55% of respondents said Trump would do a “better job” on the economy, compared with 33% for Biden.
Forty-eight percent of respondents stated that Trump would be more “competent” and “effective.” Thirty-two percent said the same for Biden, who will turn 82 years old two weeks after Election Day.
A plurality of 43% of respondents indicated Biden would do a “better job” of “protecting democracy.” Forty-one percent said the same for Trump – a two-point difference within the margin of error for most polls.
Forty-four percent of respondents said Biden would do a “better job” on abortion, compared with 32% who said the same for Trump.
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Multiple Biden surrogates, including Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have pushed Biden to campaign more openly on his radically pro-abortion stance.
However, this strategy might backfire for the incumbent president. A May 2023 Gallup poll showed that only 34% of Americans believe abortion should be legal “under any circumstances,” while a majority of 66% believe there should be “some restrictions.”
