Donald Trump has widened his lead in the presidential race against Joe Biden after the president’s disastrous debate performance, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.
Trump now leads Biden by 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward Trump from a week earlier. Notably, it is the biggest lead Trump has recorded in a Times/Siena poll since 2015 and will do nothing to ease pressure on Biden to pull out of the race.
The gap is even wider among registered voters with Trump at 49 percent compared with Biden’s 41 percent.
The poll identified voters’ growing concern that the 81-year-old president is too old to govern effectively, a majority view across every demographic, geographic and ideological group in the poll, including Black voters and even those who say they will still vote for him.
A total of 74 percent of voters view him as too old for the job, up five percentage points since the debate. Those concerns have jumped eight percentage points among Democrats since the debate to 59 percent. Even more alarming for Biden is that independent voters who said they felt that way rose to 79 percent, nearly matching the Republican view of the president.
Despite calls from Democrats for Biden to step down gaining steam on Tuesday, the poll found more voters believe he should remain the Democratic nominee but that was likely because Republicans now want him to be Trump’s opponent.
There is no doubt that Biden’s woeful debate performance is responsible for the devastating poll results. Those who said they watched the debate said Trump outperformed Biden, 60 percent to 22 percent, while only 16 percent of voters said Biden did well, and a paltry 3 percent said he did very well.
The NYT/Siena poll comes a day after a similar CNN poll, the first major poll since the debate, also showed Biden trailing Trump by six points.
That poll found that 75 percent of voters surveyed said the Democrats would have a better chance if someone other than Biden was the nominee.
Biden’s approval rating hit in the CNN poll showed him at a dangerously low figure of 36 percent following the debate. However, a match-up between Kamala Harris and Trump showed the vice president only two points behind, recording 45 percent support compared with Trump’s 47 percent.
The post Another Crushing Poll for Biden Shows Trump Pulling Ahead appeared first on The Daily Beast.
