President Biden trails Republican front-runner Donald Trump in all seven key swing states in a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 matchup, according to a new survey out Wednesday.
The Bloomberg News/ Morning Consult poll shows Trump leading Biden in Arizona (47%-44%), Georgia (49%-41%), Michigan (47%-42%), Nevada (48%-40%), North Carolina (49%-39%), Pennsylvania (48%-45%) and Wisconsin (49%-44%).
Biden, 81, won six of those seven states over Trump, 77, in the 2020 election — only losing North Carolina.
If the poll results hold on Nov. 5 and the remaining 43 states and the District of Columbia vote the same way as they did four years ago, Trump would defeat Biden in the Electoral College by a count of 311-227.
Across the seven swing states, Trump has 48% support while Biden has 42%
The numbers are similar to those from a New York Times/ Siena College poll taken in November that also indicated Biden is lagging in the states he needs to win the most.
The incumbent has ramped up his re-election campaign in recent weeks and has focused on contrasting his tenure with Trump’s four years in office.
During a campaign speech Tuesday night in Miami, Biden said Trump left the country with a “pandemic that was raging” and “an economy that was reeling.” The president’s camp has also stressed Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
Biden was optimistic about his chances in Florida, saying he would “win” the state, which voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
The poll indicated that immigration is a resonant issue for swing-state voters, with 61% of respondents blaming Biden for being at least somewhat responsible for the record-breaking number of migrants illegally crossing the southern border. Only 30% of voters said the same for the Trump administration.
Nearly 60% said congressional Democrats shared the border blame, while just 38% said the same of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Swing-state voters are also increasingly trusting of Trump to handle the border, with 22% saying they had more faith in the former president than in Biden on the issue, up from 17% in a similar December poll.
For Trump, the poll found that more than half (53%) of battleground state voters would not back him if he were found guilty of a crime. That number increased to 55% if he was sentenced to prison time.
Among swing-state Republicans, 23% said they were unwilling to support Trump if convicted, while more than three-quarters (79%) of voters who dislike both Trump and Biden said they were unwilling to support the GOP front-runner if he was convicted.
The poll was conducted online Jan. 16-22 among a sample of 4,956 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The survey has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 1 percentage point across all seven states; 3 points in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania; 4 points in Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin; and 5 points in Nevada.
