Former President Donald Trump narrowly leads President Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch, a new national Wall Street Journal poll finds, with Biden weighed down by relatively soft support among “disaffected Democrats.”
Registered voters’ presidential preference differs across several other scenarios included in the survey, highlighting the degree to which voters’ intentions remain fluid at this very early stage of the race.
In a choice between Trump and Biden, 47% of registered voters in the US currently say they’d support Trump and 43% say they’d support Biden, with a tenth still undecided. That’s similar to other recent national polls, which have largely either found a close race with no leader or have given Trump a narrow advantage.
The Wall Street Journal poll finds Biden maintaining only 87% of his 2020 supporters, compared with the 94% of 2020 Trump voters who say they’d back the Republican now. And the Journal notes that “voters who are undecided on the presidential race lean Democratic in other survey questions, suggesting that they could be persuaded to back Biden nearly a year from now.”
When voters are prompted to think of a hypothetical scenario in which Trump is convicted of a felony in “either the classified documents or January 6th federal trials” prior to the election, they split almost evenly between the two candidates, with 46% saying they’d back Biden under those circumstances, and 45% that they’d support Trump.
And when potential third-party or independent candidates are included, Trump’s edge over Biden widens slightly.
In hypothetical matchups with two other potential Republican nominees, Biden ties with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (45% DeSantis, 45% Biden) but runs well behind former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (51% Haley, 34% Biden).
Views of the national environment, meanwhile, remain unquestionably bleak. Just 26% of registered voters say the US has moved in the right direction on inflation over the past year, although that’s up from 20% who said the same in August. Biden’s approval stands at 37% among registered voters, the poll finds.
The Wall Street Journal also looked at the upcoming GOP primary, finding Trump at 59% among potential Republican primary voters nationally, with Haley and DeSantis effectively tied for a distant second place, at 15% and 14% respectively. That’s similar to other recent polling on the Republican primary, with most surveys giving Trump majority support among the potential GOP electorate nationally.
The poll was conducted November 29 and December 4 among a random national sample of 1,500 registered voters. Results for the full sample of adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 points.
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