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If the next presidential election were held today, former President Donald Trump would defeat President Biden by six percentage points and Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points, according to a new poll.
The 45th president would unseat Biden by a 47% to 41% margin, according to the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll published by The Hill. However, 12% of voters are undecided.
Harris going up against Trump would produce an even worse result for Democrats — 49% would vote for the former president compared to 38% for the veep.
Neither Trump nor Biden has officially thrown his hat into the 2024 ring, but both have hinted that they would run again.
“The truth is I ran twice, I won twice and I just did better the second time. And now, we just might have to do it again,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Georgia Saturday night.
Biden said last week that he would be “very fortunate” to face Trump again in 2024.
“The next election, I’d be very fortunate if I had that same man running against me,” the president said during a news conference in Brussels on Thursday after meeting with NATO allies about the Ukraine invasion.
Biden defeated Trump in 2020 with 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232, winning the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won the popular vote count by more than 7 million.
But the poll’s findings, coming months before the midterm elections in which Republicans hope to regain control of Congress, carry ominous signs for Democrats and Biden, whose job approval rating stood at 39% in the poll and who is faced with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rates of inflation not seen in decades, and surging gas prices that are hitting consumers hard in the pocketbook.
“I would not give a lot of weight to trial heats right now other than they reflect the weakness of Biden and the administration right now,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the poll.
“That Trump beats them both by a wide margin suggests most Republican nominees once known fully by the public would beat them unless they are able to pivot out of the current nadir in their numbers,” he added.
If Biden, 79, and Trump, 75, opt not to run again, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the favorite to carry the GOP standard.
In that scenario, Harris would narrowly defeat DeSantis, 40% to 38%.
A plurality of Republican voters (28%) would back DeSantis if Trump decides against running in 2024, while 24% would support former Vice President Mike Pence and 10% would pick Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). No other Republican received double-digit support.
The online poll surveyed 1,990 registered voters from March 23 to 24.