Trump notches considerable lead over Biden in five swing states: poll

Donald Trump is notching considerable leads against President Biden in five of six key battleground states, a new poll has found.

The GOP frontrunner is up between 4 to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to a New York Times, Siena College poll.

Trump lost all of those states to Biden in the 2020 election.

Taken together, those five states account for 69 electoral college votes.

For context, Trump lost the electoral college to Biden 232 to 306. A candidate must get 270 votes to win the presidency.

The only state among the six where Trump trails Biden is Wisconsin, where the incumbent president has a two percentage point edge, per the poll.

The 77-year-old former president is also generally besting Biden nationally in polls, with a 0.5 percentage point edge in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate.

No Republican has won the popular vote for president since 2004, so some analysts have questioned some of those findings.

The NYT/Siena College poll’s results in battleground states echoes similar findings to a myriad of other polling, showing Trump with a lead over Biden in key swing states.

In Nevada, Trump beats Biden 52% to 41%, while the RCP aggregate has Trump ahead 46.7% to 44.3%.

In Georgia, Trump is up 49% to 43%, while the RCP aggregate has it 48.5% to 43%.

Down in Arizona, Trump is ahead 49% to 44%, while the RCP aggregate has it 47% to 43.3%.

In Michigan, Trump is up 49% to 43% compared to the RCP aggregate at 44.2% to 43%.

And in Pennsylvania, Trump leads 48% to 44%, while the RCP aggregate has him up 45.5% to 43.5%.

Meanwhile, Trump is trailing Biden 45% to 47% in Wisconsin, according to the NYT/Siena College poll, while barely topping Biden in the RCP aggregate 44.3% to 43.7%.

Both men, who are well-positioned at the moment to become their respective party’s standard bearers in the 2024 election are deeply unpopular among vast swathes of the electorate, the poll found.

This comes amid concerns about Biden’s age and Trump’s 91 criminal counts that he is facing spanning across four different indictments.

Biden, 80, will celebrate his birthday later this month on Nov. 20. He is already the oldest president in US history and would be 86 at the conclusion of a hypothetical second term.

A staggering 71% of voters felt that Biden is “too old” to be president, including 54% of his own backers, while only 39% felt the same way about Trump, including 19% of Trump’s backers, per the poll.

His campaign has recently begun trying to undercut concerns about his age by spotlighting Trump’s various flubs and mishaps on the campaign trail such as not knowing what Iowa city he was in last month.

Last month, Biden got a new Democratic primary challenger from Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) who has cited the president’s age and unpopularity as his reason for mounting the challenge.

Phillips is widely considered a longshot contender.

Trump also has an edge on the economy, with voters trusting him more than Biden by a margin of 59% to 37%, per the poll. 

Biden has worked to brandish his image on the economy, including by boasting about the 4.9% third-quarter growth figure.

Biden still has almost exactly a year before the election takes place.

This coming week, voters in places like Kentucky and Virginia will head to the ballots for off-year elections, which could serve as another bellwether for where voters are at.

Republican presidential contenders will also square off in Miami for the third primary debate of the cycle, with Trump once again expected to skip and host a rally nearby instead.

The NYT/Siena College poll was conducted among 3,662 registered voters in those six states via telephone from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3.

The margin of error for those states was between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points.