Former President Donald Trump led President Joe Biden in five out of six key battleground states, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College, a Franciscan-run school in Loudonville, New York.
But the poll also revealed key weaknesses for both candidates and found that a majority of the same voters support legal abortion.
Trump led Biden with voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania by margins of 4 to 10 percentage points, according to the poll, with Biden leading Trump in Wisconsin by 2 points. In the 2020 election between the same two men, Biden carried each of those six states.
With the 2024 election about a year away, the poll found both men are unpopular with voters, with some expressing frustration with Biden’s economic policies or concern over his age. Biden is 80, while Trump is 77.
However, others expressed concerns about Trump’s criminal indictments and said they view him as a threat to democracy.
A plurality of voters view Trump — who has not yet formally secured his party’s nomination in his third bid for the White House but currently leads his GOP rivals in polling — as a threat to Democracy, the poll found. Trump has never conceded defeat in the 2020 election and sought to overturn the election results to remain in office.
In a statement, Don Levy, director of Siena College Research Institute, said, “Despite former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in five of six battleground states, a plurality of voters, 41%, in those states in this New York Times/Siena College poll say that Trump is ‘bad for democracy,’ compared to 31% who say he’s ‘good for democracy,’ and 25% who say he’s ‘neither good nor bad for democracy.'”
“Pluralities of between 36% and 47% of voters in each state says Trump’s bad for democracy,” Levy added in a statement.
However, when presented with a choice between Trump and a generic Democrat, voters favored the Democrat by 12 points, the poll found. It also found that a generic Republican would lead Biden by a higher margin than Trump.
The poll also found that voters in those same states said abortion should be legal in most circumstances.
“Across the six states, 62% of voters say abortion should always or mostly be legal, compared to 30% who say it should always or mostly be illegal,” Levy said. “Net support for abortions being legal ranges from 26 points in Georgia to 40 points in Nevada. While there is only a small gender gap — women say legal by 38 points and men by 25 points — there is a wide partisan divide, with 84% of Democrats and 68% of independents saying legal, and 54% of Republicans saying illegal.”
On proposals to implement a federal ban on elective abortions after 15 weeks, “the gap narrows, with 51% opposing and 42% supporting,” Levy said.
“While Wisconsin voters support that proposal by five points, voters in the other five states oppose it by between seven and 20 points,” he said.
According to the Times, the newspaper and Siena College Research Institute interviewed about 600 respondents in each of the six states totaling 3,662 registered voters “to ensure we had a large enough sample to speak to specific subgroups of voters within these states, including age, race and ethnicity, income, education level, and party affiliation.” The interviews were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, prior to the results being released Nov. 5 and 6, pollsters said.
TAGLINE: Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) @kgscanlon.
