With just over six months to go until Election Day, two new polls are spelling trouble for President Biden as he faces off against former President Trump in a 2024 rematch.
Biden trails Trump by six points, according to a CNN national survey.
And new numbers from Gallup indicate Biden had the lowest approval rating during the first quarter of his re-election year of any president in the past 70 years.
Trump leads Biden 49%-43% among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup, according to the CNN poll.
And in a five-person race, the survey indicates Trump topping Biden 42%-33%, with Democrat turned independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at 16%, independent progressive candidate Cornell West at 4%, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 3%.
The CNN survey stands out from other national polls also conducted in mid-April by Quinnipiac University, Marist College, NBC News, and the New York Times/Siena College, which indicated a much closer contest between the Democratic incumbent in the White House and his Republican predecessor.
Trump, a longtime vocal critic of CNN, took to social media to write, ‘GOOD POLL NUMBERS, FROM CNN OF ALL PLACES’
Americans have a tendency to view past presidencies with more favorability over time, and that appears to be the case with Trump, whose combustible tenure in the White House ended over three years ago.
The CNN survey suggests that 55% of Americans now say they view Trump’s presidency as a success, with 44% seeing it as a failure, down 11 points from a CNN poll conducted soon after Trump left office and also following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
According to the new survey, 61% rate Biden’s presidency so far as a failure, with 39% calling it a success.
‘Opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure,’ CNN spotlights.
Biden remains deeply underwater in the new poll, with a 40% approval rating and 60% giving the president a thumbs down on the job he’s doing in the White House.
According to Gallup, Biden averaged a 38.7% job approval rating during his 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended on April 19.
‘None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden,’ Gallup highlighted in their poll.
Of the four other presidents who had approval ratings under 50% in the first quarter of their re-election year, according to Gallup polling – Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump – only Obama won a second term in office.
The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS from April 18-23, with 1,212 adults questioned. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.