Considering his past few weeks have been spent in court defending himself from felony charges and not campaigning for a second term, a recent poll showing former President Donald Trump way ahead in the race for the White House must have come as a very welcome surprise to the 45th President’s campaign staff.
A CNN poll of more than 900 registered voters released Sunday shows that, if the November election were held today, the former president would beat incumbent President Joe Biden by six points. That number grows to a nine-point spread when third-party candidates are included in the survey.
“In the coming rematch, 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 Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta wrote with the poll’s release.
A majority of voters looking back on Trump’s time in office, 55%, say the 44th President’s first term was a success, a reversal of the numbers seen just after he left office. Meanwhile, a full 61% said that Biden’s presidency has been a failure, including 27% of Democratic voters polled.
“Even Biden’s strongest issue approval ratings in the poll are also in negative territory, with 45% approving of his handling of health care policy and 44% approving his handling of student loan debt. And his worst issue approval rating – for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza – yields 28% approval to 71% disapproval, including an 81% disapproval mark among those younger than 35 and majority disapproval among Democrats,” Agiesta wrote.
The CNN survey is at odds with other recent polling, which has shown Trump and Biden neck-and-neck as Trump’s support slips among independent voters in any race including former Democrat turned Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
According to a Morning Consult poll of nearly 10,000 registered voters released last Tuesday and taken in the days after the first trial of a former U.S. president began, Biden slipped ahead of his Republican rival by a single point to lead 44% to 43%, a 3-point swing from just one week earlier.
A Marist poll released the day before showed the elder politician up by three points among more than 1,000 registered voters surveyed and a full six points among those who said they will definitely vote this November.
Both polls showed that adding independent candidates RFK Jr. and Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the mix only further complicates matters for Trump’s second try at a second term.
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Marist pollsters said that “Trump’s support among independents is also down (30% from 38%) in a multi-candidate field. While Biden’s support is little changed (34% from 33%), Kennedy’s support among independents has inched up to 27% from 21%, previously.”
Still, as might be expected, Team Trump was quick to take a victory lap after the release of CNN’s Sunday poll.
“President Trump crushes Crooked Joe Biden with 9-Point Lead; 61% call Biden presidency a failure,” they wrote Sunday in campaign emails.
Trump shared the results of the poll via his Truth Social media platform as a series of images without much comment, but chose to strike out at Kennedy beforehand, claiming the independent candidate is “in fact, far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including West and Stein” and noting his apparently shifting stance on vaccines.
“Yet despite this, he has no hope as a Democrat because they were able to use their typically Fascist tactics of repression and throw him out of the Party, like a dog, because he was taking primary votes away from the worst President in the history of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden. So now, Juniors’ a so-called Independent, but he’s not, he’s a Radical Left Lunatic,” Trump wrote. “No Republican can vote for this guy.”