President Biden’s approval rating has hit an all-time low, and he trails former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 matchup.
Trump leads Biden 47% to 43% in a hypothetical ballot between only those two candidates and trails 37% to 31% in a hypothetical ballot with five independent candidates, according to the results of a Wall Street Journal poll released Saturday.
The president’s sagging numbers against Trump also come as voters gave Biden low approval marks, including only 23% of respondents saying Biden’s policies have helped them personally, compared to 53% who say they have been hurt by the president’s policies.
About half of respondents said they were helped by Trump’s policies when he was president, and only 37% said the former president’s policies harmed them.
Former President Donald Trump, left, and President Biden. (Getty Images )
Biden’s overall job performance garnered only 37% approval from survey respondents as well, a new low for the WSJ poll. Meanwhile, 61% of respondents see his overall image in an unfavorable light, which is a record high for the poll.
The president also compared unfavorably to Trump when it comes to most issues, with a majority of respondents saying Trump was better suited for the economy, inflation, and border security. Trump also garnered higher marks than Biden on crime and ability to handle the Israel-Hamas conflict. Meanwhile, Biden only topped Trump on abortion and setting a better tone in politics.
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“Americans were better off financially under President Trump. Now, under Crooked Joe Biden, we have runaway inflation, a porous southern border, crime in our streets, and chaos around the globe,” Jason Miller, a Senior Trump Advisor, told Fox News Digital.
Former President Donald Trump leaves the stage at a campaign rally. (AP Photo/Reba Saldanha)
“If this race is about policy and performance, then Donald Trump has a significant advantage,” Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Michael Bocian, said of the results. “If this race is about temperament and character, things like that, then Biden has an advantage.”
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Bocian, meanwhile, said Biden might be struggling with groups that have traditionally sided with Democrats, including young Latino and Black Americans.
President Joe Biden exits the White House on his way to Marine One on the South Lawn. ((Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images))
“They are feeling economically stressed and challenged right now. And they are not showing enthusiasm in the way they were turning out in 2020, 2022,” he said.
The poll surveyed 1,500 registers voters between November 29 and December 4, having a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.
The Wall Street Journal survey is the latest national poll the past two months to indicate Trump with the edge over Biden in hypothetical general election matchups.
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Biden once held the upper hand over Trump in 2024 rematch surveys, but Trump began enjoying an advantage over his successor in the White House in most polls starting in October. And a Siena College survey for the New York Times released early last month indicated Trump topping Biden in five of the six key battleground states the president carried over Trump in the 2020 election. The survey sparked another round of stories spotlighting Biden’s polling woes.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Saturday, Nov. 18, 2023, in Fort Dodge, Iowa. (AP Photo/Bryon Houlgrave) (AP Photo/Bryon Houlgrave)
The new Wall Street Journal survey is also the latest to indicate that Biden remains well underwater in the most important metric of his presidency – his approval rating.
Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low to mid 50s during his first six months in the White House. But the president’s numbers started sagging in August 2021 in the wake of Biden’s much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan and following a surge in COVID-19 cases that summer among mainly unvaccinated people.
The plunge in the president’s approval was also fueled by soaring inflation — which started spiking in the summer of 2021 and remains to date a major pocketbook concern with Americans — and the surge of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. along the southern border with Mexico.
President Biden headlines a labor rally, on June 17, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The president is running in 2024 for a second term in the White House (AP )
Biden stands far below where his three most recent two-term predecessors stood at this point in their presidencies, as they successfully ran for re-election. The only recent president whose approval ratings were nearly as negative as Biden’s current numbers was his most recent predecessor — Trump.
Amid the spate of polls suggesting Biden trails Trump in a likely 2024 election rematch, the Biden campaign and Democratic allies point back nearly a dozen years.
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That’s when former President Barack Obama — with Biden as his running mate — won re-election to a second term in the White House in 2012 despite polls a year earlier predicting a ballot box defeat for the incumbent.
“Predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said last month. “Don’t take our word for it: Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama, only for him to win handedly a year later.”
Obama was saddled in late 2011 with unfavorable polling a year before his re-election, but his standing was not as troublesome as the deficits Biden currently faces.