In 2020, it took the entire Democratic coalition — women, Black voters, Latinos, independents and disaffected Republicans — plus a global pandemic for Joe Biden to defeat then-President Donald Trump and remove him from office.
But 15 months until Election Day 2024, a new poll shows the coalition that carried Biden to victory has frayed in a hypothetical Biden-versus-Trump rematch.
Overall, the new national New York Times/Siena College poll finds Biden and Trump tied at 43% among registered voters. A combined 14% say they support a different candidate, wouldn’t vote or refused to answer.
Yet it’s the crosstabs breaking down those numbers that reveal Biden’s erosion from 2020, when he won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points and the Electoral College 306-232.
In the Times/Siena poll, Biden leads Trump by 10 points among voters ages 18-29, when the 2020 exit poll him with a 24-point advantage among this demographic. He’s up 12 points among women, when it was 15 points in 2020. He’s ahead by 59 points among Black voters, when it was 75 points in his last election. He’s up 3 points among Latinos, down from 33 points in the 2020 results, and he’s ahead by 5 points among independents, when it was 13 points in 2020.
Despite that erosion, however, Biden (with a 43% favorable rating) remains more personally popular than Trump (41%) in the poll. The share of voters saying the nation is headed in the right direction and that the economy is in good shape is higher than a year ago, the survey finds.
And as the Republican Party heads into a bruising presidential primary season — and Biden faces little real opposition for the Democratic nomination — it’s possible that Biden’s numbers will rebound, especially as the calendar gets closer to the 2024 general election.
But for now, a 2024 Biden-Trump rematch looks to be close — not only in the Times/Siena poll, but also other surveys including the NBC News poll.
And if it’s close, Biden and the Democrats will need maximum support from every part of their coalition to win again.
