New Delhi: A year ahead of the 2024 US Presidential election, President Joe Biden is trailing behind his likeliest Republican rival Donald Trump in five battleground states, a survey by The New York Times/Siena College has found.
48 percent of voters in five six swing states favour Trump over Biden, the survey finds.
Biden, who announced he will be running for a second term this April, is facing a wave of public discontent as two-thirds of voters in swing states see the US moving in the “wrong direction”. More so, key sections of Biden’s voter base in these swing states, who provided him that extra edge in the 2020 presidential election, have started to back Trump.
The poll found that 22 per cent African-American voters in these states were supporting Trump, “a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times”.
Swing states, or battleground states, are those that could “swing” to either Democratic or Republican candidates, since they don’t have historic allegiances. The primary six include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin which unlike say, California or Tennessee, have not had a consistent record of voting blue or red.
Due to the nature of American elections in which the Electoral College takes precedence over the popular vote, swing states can very often decide who becomes president.
In the 2016 elections, for example, Donald Trump won key swing states and therefore the presidency, even though his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton secured the popular vote. Therefore, political parties often spend a considerable amount of time and resources campaigning in these states.
According to the The New York Times/Siena College poll, Biden is losing to Trump by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in five of the six key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and even his home state Pennsylvania.
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