WASHINGTON: Ahead of the upcoming US election scheduled for November, President Joe Biden is trailing behind his main opponent Donald Trump in six of the seven battleground states, according to a latest opinion poll.
Voters are broadly dissatisfied with the national economy and there are deep doubts about Biden’s capabilities and job performance, the survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal revealed.
Trump leads between two and eight percentage points in six battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. However, Biden is leading Trump by three points in Wisconsin.
In every state in the survey, negative views of the president’s job performance outweigh positive views by 16 percentage points or more, with the gap topping 20 points in four states. By contrast, Trump earns an unfavourable job review for his time in the White House in only a single state — Arizona — where negative marks outweigh positive ones by 1 percentage point, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to Real Clear Politics, which keeps tracks of all the major national polls, Trump and Biden are in a neck-to-neck fight this fall. An average of major national polls shows that Trump is leading Biden by 0.8 percentage points.
“Biden and Trump both easily became their party’s presumptive nominees last month, but each candidate will face a long and difficult campaign in a rematch of the 2020 contest. In a race expected to be razor-tight, a handful of battleground states will likely determine the winner,” The Hill newspaper said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, The Biden administration on Thursday issued final rules meant to protect the jobs of the government’s 2.2 million civil servants, as Republican challenger Donald Trump plans to replace thousands with hardline loyalists if he returns to the White House.