– [Narrator] Former President Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in six of the seven most competitive
states in the 2024 election. – These are the states that are gonna be the most competitive and most likely to determine the outcome. – [Narrator] Here are five takeaways from the Wall Street Journal's new poll. The Poll found that in
a head-to-head matchup, Trump leads between one
and six percentage points in six states. The one outlier was Wisconsin, where the two candidates are tied. – One thing we're seeing in this Poll is that President Biden
has a significant challenge in holding together the coalition
that elected him in 2020.
(bright music) – [Narrator] In that same
survey, voters were quizzed on which of the two
candidates they'd prefer when it came to the economy,
immigration, abortion, and mental and physical
fitness needed to be president. On these three voters
preferred Trump over Biden by 20 percentage points. The only issue Biden pulled
higher on was abortion, where he led Trump by
12 percentage points. – People have a lot of
things in their minds, and it's the job of the
campaign to make the issue that's most favorable to
them, top of mind and voters. For Biden, that's gonna be abortion. You'll see them out there
talking quite often about Donald Trump's role in
nominating Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe V. Wade. – Trump proudly says, quote, after 50 years with no one coming close, I was able to kill Roe V.
Wade. – At the same time you see
Donald Trump out there trying to make immigration
the most salient issue, at least right now in voters' minds. – It's a border bloodbath and
it's destroying our country. – And which issue is dominant as voters go to vote could determine
for undecided voters which lever they pull. One thing that screams out
from this poll is the broad dissatisfaction that voters
have with the economy. And in fact, in these seven swing states, voters are more focused on the economy and more sour over the economy
than are voters nationwide, and that's a problem for Joe Biden. The economy is strong
by traditional measures, but people aren't giving
the president credit for it, and that's something he's
gonna need to address.
– [Narrator] The survey also
found an unusual dynamic. Voters in these battleground
states say the national economy is in bad shape, but
conditions in their home states are generally good. – This is one of the puzzles
that we see in polling, not just in this poll, but in many polls. People say that the
economy is doing poorly, but they quite often say
that their own finances and their own part of the
economy is doing fine. – [Narrator] Third-party
and independent candidates represent an unpredictable
element in the election. – 15% as of now say that they would vote for a third-party candidate or an independent candidate
like Robert F. Kennedy Jr or Cornell West. And when you add in that some people who right now say they're
gonna support Trump or Biden say that it's
possible, they'll vote for them, but not definite. You get as much as a
third of the electorate, that's still up for grabs. – [Narrator] When asked
who they would vote for in a 2024 election that
included third-party and independent candidates,
voters again favored Trump.
In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,
North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, Kennedy is
seeing the most support in Nevada with 15%. – Robert F. Kennedy
represents a real wild card in this election. We found that he is much more attractive to Republican voters than
the Democratic voters. That suggests that if he gets
on the ballot in these states, which is still an unknown, he could take more votes from Donald Trump than he takes from Joe Biden. But there are gonna be
other candidates on most of these ballots, libertarian candidate, Green Party candidate, maybe Cornell West, another independent, and
those as a group seem to take more from Biden than from Trump. If you ask about all
these candidates together, their effect seems to
cancel each other out. – [Narrator] But the
pollsters consider voters who back these candidates
to be persuadable and potentially open to
backing either Trump or Biden. The voters most up for
grabs view Biden, Trump and the economy more unfavorably
than do voters overall. Some 74% rate the economy
as poor or not so good compared with 63% of battleground
state voters overall. Some 67% view Biden unfavorably and 61% hold a negative view of Trump.
In both cases about
eight points higher than among all voters in the survey. One result is that Biden
is seeing declining support among Black, Hispanic, and young voters. – A mere 68%, of black voters saying
that they're ready to vote for Joe Biden compared
to about 90% nationally in the last election. When you see Hispanic men,
as we do in this poll, favoring Trump over Biden,
that's a real problem for the Biden campaign. If it suggests a long-term
trend, it's a real problem for Democrats broadly, it suggests that their
coalition is fracturing, but it could be that this
is a temporary feature and that in the course of the
campaign we have seven months of campaigning, seven months of advertising
messages yet to come.
Democrats and Joe Biden
can win these voters back. Now the poll does surface
problems for Donald Trump as well. He's viewed more
unfavorably than favorably and when people think back
to his time as president, they're kind of equivocal
about how it was. He gets better marks as
president than Biden does, but they're not overwhelmingly positive. Moreover, there's an important
voter group that seems to be shifting away from Donald Trump. While young voters seem
to be more open to voting Republican, seniors seem to be more
open to voting Democratic. That's something to
watch as we move forward and could be a potential
trouble sign for Donald Trump..