Former President Trump leads President Biden and Vice President Harris in hypothetical 2024 presidential match-ups, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Monday.
The poll found that if the 2024 election were held today, 45 percent of respondents would vote for Trump in a race against Biden, who attracted the support of 41 percent of respondents, while 14 percent were unsure or didn’t know.
In a hypothetical Trump-Harris match-up, Trump’s lead expands to 7 percentage points. Forty-seven percent said they would support Trump, compared to 40 percent for Harris and 13 percent who were unsure or didn’t know.
Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey, noted how Biden would be a weaker candidate in a race against Trump today than he performed in 2020.
“Biden is a very weak Democratic nominee and would lose even the popular vote in a rematch today,” Penn said. “Trump is far from 50 percent support, and there is a high undecided vote despite everyone knowing the candidates, because the public wants new over more of the same.”
The poll comes as Biden’s approval rating remains at roughly the lowest point in his presidency. The poll found his approval rating clocked in at 38 percent, which was unchanged from when the pollsters asked the question a month ago.
Biden and White House officials have repeatedly said the president intends to run in 2024 if his health allows.
Trump, meanwhile, has tiptoed closer to another White House bid, but some Republican lawmakers have publicly suggested Trump should wait to announce until after the midterm elections to avoid shifting the focus away from inflation when voters head to the ballot box in November.
The two presidents’ and Harris’s favorability ratings, however, all remain underwater.
Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed said they had a favorable view of Biden, compared to 44 percent for Trump. Just thirty-six percent of voters said they had a favorable view of Harris.
A majority of respondents indicated they did not want Trump nor Biden to run in 2024.
Nearly 7 in 10 respondents — 69 percent — said Biden should not run for a second term, while 59 percent of respondents said Trump shouldn’t run.
The poll was conducted online on July 27-28 among 1,885 registered voters in a collaboration between the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll.
The survey is weighted to reflect known demographics, and as a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.