President Joe Biden holds a comfortable 12-point lead over Donald Trump in New Hampshire in a potential 2024 matchup, in part thanks to the former president’s significant weakness among voters of his own party, according to a new poll released Friday.
Fifty-two percent of respondents to the CNN/UNH poll said they would back the incumbent Biden in a rematch against Trump, who secured just 40 percent of the vote. Trump is notably weaker with voters of his own party than is Biden: while 94 percent of Democrats say they’d support Biden against Trump in a hypothetical general-election contest, just 79 percent of Republicans say the same of Trump.
While a majority said they would be unhappy if either Biden (56 percent) or Trump (62) returned to the White House in 2024, expressions of anger and frustration were markedly higher for the former president. Of the 801 state residents surveyed by CNN and the University of New Hampshire, over half (56 percent) expressed hostility to the idea of a new Trump presidency.
A majority of respondents also expressed disapproval at the bulk of Republican presidential candidates, including entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (62 percent), former Vice-President Mike Pence (76 percent), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (72 percent), former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (57 percent), and Florida governor Ron DeSantis (63 percent).
Although Trump remains the leading Republican candidate across most surveys, in recent months, Biden has clawed into the former president’s core voter base. An analysis conducted by the Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence found that Trump’s share of white voters has nearly halved since 2020, falling from 17 percentage points to under 9 percent.
“Barring some miracle or a third-party candidate that splinters the Democrats, if Trump is the nominee and is only nine points up against Biden with whites, he has little chance of winning the election,” Bryon Allen, a partner with WPA Intelligence, told National Review in a statement following the report. “It’s worth recalling that John McCain outperformed Barack Obama by twelve points with white voters in 2012 — and lost in a landslide.”
In early August, a similar head-to-head poll run by New York Times/Siena College found Trump and Biden locked in a virtual dead heat, grabbing 43 percent of voters, respectively.
“A majority of Americans have deep, deep concerns about Biden’s physical and mental state; Kamala Harris is the least liked Vice President in the poll’s history; and notwithstanding both, Biden/Harris would still beat Trump. All the GOP has to do is avoid Trump, and many of them won’t let him go,” conservative radio talk-show host Erick Erickson wrote on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, following the survey.