New York [US], August 2: Former US president Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden are locked in a neck-and-neck race for the White House in 2024, a new poll revealed.
Despite Trump's deepening legal woes, voters are split right down the middle in a rematch of the 2020 race with 43 percent supporting each candidate, according to a new Siena College/New York Times poll released on Tuesday.
In a glimmer of good news for Democrats, the 14 percent of voters who don't support either candidate seem to lean fairly strongly to Biden.
The president opens up a narrow 2 percent overall lead in the poll when those so-called "double hater" voters are allocated based on whom they say they voted for last time. Biden holds a similar advantage if the poll is only limited to those who actually voted in either 2020 or 2022.
Biden beat Trump by 4.5 percent in 2020, or about 7 million votes. But that popular vote victory translated into a razor-thin margin in battleground states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia that forged his win in the electoral college, suggesting the poll's margin could lead to another extreme nail biter.
The poll shows Biden is consolidating support among Democrats, many of whom once hoped he would hand over the baton to a younger, more dynamic figure.
Another sign of potential upside for Biden is that young voters, who overwhelmingly hold liberal views on issues like abortion rights, are still on the fence. Trump, on the other hand, has maintained an enduring strength despite becoming the first former president to be criminally charged The poll shows virtually no drop off among voters who supported him in 2020 and very little decline among Republicans belying any possible affect from the criminal cases that Trump derides as a partisan witch hunt.
He has maintained his base of support among white male voters without a college degree.
Source: Qatar Tribune