The good news for the president Joe Biden in our new NBC News national poll is that he appears to have climbed out of the political hole he found himself in this winter: his overall approval rating rose 5 points compared to January, and he is now behind the former president donald trump fell just 2 points among registered voters, down from a 5-point deficit three months ago.
The bad news for Biden is that his current political position is back to where it was in the fall of 2023, when his re-election prospects were already on shaky ground.
It underscores an important point about the 2024 presidential election, with six months to go: The Biden-Trump race has been remarkably stable — and remarkably competitive — with the movement within the margin of error.
Take the two-way vote between Biden and Trump, for example. Over the course of nearly a year, Trump’s percentage stagnated between 45% and 47% of registered voters, matching his share of the popular vote in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Biden’s percentage, meanwhile, fluctuated between a high of 49 % in the summer of 2023 and a minimum of 42% in January.
Or take Biden’s approval rating, which has been consistently below 45% since the beginning of January 2023, and which hit a low of 37% in the first month of this year. It is now at 42% in our latest survey.
Or look at Biden and Trump’s favorability ratings, which are nearly identical:
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Biden: 38% positive, 52% negative (minus 14 net rating)
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Trump: 38% positive, 53% negative (minus 15 net rating)
Or remove the names at the top of the ticket from the equation and observe the stable preference of Congress in the survey. Right now, 47% prefer a Republican-controlled Congress in the new NBC poll, compared to 46% who want Democrats. The parties have been stuck in this competitive position for years: The Republican Party’s number has not moved more than 2 points in either direction in NBC News polls since August 2021, while the Democratic number has moved out of that range only once.
So, despite all the news, developments and drama over the past year, this race has barely changed. And it’s extremely close.
But the new NBC News survey also points to at least three potential unforeseen events that could disrupt this stability.
The first is Trump’s criminal trial in New York. Although his multiple criminal charges and legal challenges helped him with Republican primary voters in 2023 and earlier this year, the NBC poll finds 50% of voters say he is being considered the same as anyone accused of such a crime, versus 43% who believe he is being unfairly targeted.
The majority that says Trump is being held to the same standard as everyone else is larger than the vote share Biden gets in a head-to-head matchup against the former president. Bottom line: The legal challenges don’t appear to be a political win for Trump with the general electorate — at least at this point.
Another potential wildcard is third-party voting. For months, the conventional wisdom has been that the larger the size of the third-party vote, the greater the it would be worse for Biden. And that may still be the case, given that Trump’s consistent 46% to 47% vote share becomes a winning percentage if the third-party vote is greater than 6%.
However, our NBC News research show independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hurting Trump more than Biden at the moment.
And a final wildcard is eventual participation in the 2024 presidential race. As our poll findsThe level of high interest in this competition is at a 20-year low, signaling that participation in November could be significantly lower than in 2020.
Does this lower turnout help Trump, given that more Republicans are more interested (70%) than Democrats (65%), according to the NBC News poll?
Or does it help Biden, given that many of the voters who say they support Trump are those who did not participate in the 2020 or 2022 midterm elections?
These are all reasons why a stable breed can quickly become unstable – and unpredictable.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
