Former President Donald Trump commands an 18-point lead in a four-way race with President Joe Biden and others in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom/Selzer & Co. poll taken after his conviction in the New York business records trial.
The poll, published on Monday, finds that 50 percent of all likely voters in Iowa support Trump in his bid to win back the White House. Biden lands at 32 percent, while independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. garners nine percent, and two percent back Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver.
Another three percent support someone else, three percent are undecided, and one percent will not vote if these are their options.
Trump tacks three points onto his lead over Biden compared to February, when they registered at 48 percent and 33 percent, respectively.
The 18-point margin more than doubles the 8.2 percentage victory Trump had in Iowa over Biden in 2020. He garnered 53.1 percent of the total vote to Biden’s 44.9 percent that year.
The poll also finds that less than three in ten Iowan adults approve of Biden’s performance as president. Just 28 percent give him positive marks — down one point from February — while 67 percent disapprove. Five percent do not have opinions.
Younger Iowans, in particular, are very cold to Biden.
“Just 15% of those younger than 35 approve of Biden’s job performance, while 76% disapprove,” Des Moines Register Chief Politics Reporter Brianne Pfannenstiel notes. “That’s slightly worse than February when 21% approved and 76% disapproved.”
Most independents in the Hawkeye State are also dissatisfied with the president. Just under one in four respondents (24 percent) give him positive grades, compared with 69 percent who give him negative ones.
The poll sampled 806 adults in Iowa, including 632 likely voters, from June 9-14, 2024. The margin of error is ± 3.5 percent for the sample of adults and ± 3.9 percent for likely voters.
Biden is also suffering substantial problems with his approval at the national level.
At one point on Wednesday, FiveThirtyEight showed that Biden set the record for the worst average net approval rating — the margin between approval and disapproval ratings — of any president 1,240 days into office in more than 70 years. He registered at -19.4 percent with a 37.6 percent approval rating and 57 percent disapproval rating before a Big Village poll helped his average marginally later in the day.
FiveThirtyEight’s average had his net rating at -18.1 percent nationally as of Monday. An average of 38.1 percent approved, and 56.3 percent disapproved.
