Two polls released Sunday on the 2024 presidential election showed former President Donald J. Trump cruising through the Republican primaries — and a general election between two unpopular candidates if, as seems likely, the nominees are Mr. Trump and President Biden.
Every poll showed Mr. Biden with a low approval rating. An NBC News survey found the president had a disapproval rating of 56 percent, a record high for him in NBC polls. A second survey published Sunday by The Washington Post and ABC News also found that 56 percent of voters surveyed disapproved of his performance — even though it included an election result well outside the range that other high-quality polls have found. recently, raising questions about the accuracy of the Post/ABC survey.
But when it came to personal favorability, Mr. Biden still fared better than Mr. Trump in the NBC poll, with 39 percent saying they had a very positive or somewhat positive opinion of him, compared with 35 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump. .
In the Republican presidential primaries, the NBC poll showed Trump leading his nearest rival, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a yawning 43-point margin nationwide, 59 percent to 16 percent.
The race does not appear to have tightened as criminal charges against Mr. Trump have piled up. In fact, his margin expanded from the 29 points delivered by the last edition of the same poll in June. But more than half of voters surveyed expressed concerns about his charges.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll reached similar findings, with Mr. Trump leading Mr. DeSantis nationally by nearly 40 points.
The NBC poll found the hypothetical general election tied between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, with each candidate polling 46 percent. It is the same picture that study after study has been showing for months, which underlines how insensitive party political polarization remains to the influence of current events – and also to the opinions of individual candidates, for that matter. At the same time, a series of special elections across the country have pointed to a more positive picture for Democrats, who topped the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections by double digits.
But in the likely matchup in the general election, the Post/ABC News poll drew attention to how drastically different it was from what is otherwise a fairly stable consensus in recent polls.
The poll found Mr. Trump ahead of Mr. Biden by 10 percentage points, a margin that no president has won since Ronald Reagan in 1984. There were even more unlikely results among subgroups of respondents: For example, the poll found Mr. Trump ahead was up 20 points among voters under 35, a group Mr. Biden won by double digits three years ago.
The Post itself took the unusual step of describing its own result as an outlier.
Kevin Muñoz, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, also rejected it.
“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well before next year’s general election,” he said, adding: “We will win in 2024 by our minds to put down. and do the work, not worrying about polls.”
