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 3-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.
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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 5 percentage points since the debate. Those concerns have jumped 8 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.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Biden campaign pollster Molly Murphy said, “Both internal and outside polling confirm that the race remains incredibly tight and I agree with the Times that today’s polling doesn’t fundamentally change the course of the race.”
“The work our campaign is doing on the ground will be critical to win over voters in a low trust and divided political environment. Trump’s team is doing virtually none of that work, while also being saddled with the baggage of a toxic agenda to undecided voters. President Biden has work to do, but will be running on mobilizing issues that we are confident will bring him to victory this November.”
A Wall Street Journal poll, also released Wednesday, similarly shows Trump with a 6-point lead over Biden among voters, with 80 percent of Americans saying that the president is too old to run for a second term.
Trump is now on 48 percent, with Biden on 42 percent, according to the Journal poll.
It comes a day after a similar CNN poll also showed Biden trailing Trump by 6 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.
