Donald Trump for the first time has surpassed President Biden in a national general election poll from NBC News.
The former president eked out a slim lead over his successor — 46% to 44% — and strikingly eclipsed the incumbent among younger voters, the poll released Sunday found.
“In 2019, 2020, when Trump was president, he trailed [Biden in] all of [NBC’s polls],” NBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki explained on “Meet the Press.”
“This is the first time in more than a dozen polls we’ve seen a result like this.”
Among younger voters ages 18 to 34, Trump emerged on top 46% to 42% over Biden. For context, younger voters broke for Biden by around 26 points in the 2020 election.
Only 31% of young voters approve of Biden’s job performance, down starkly from 46% in September, the poll shows.
Feeding this trend appeared to be backlash over Biden’s handling of Israel-Hamas war, an issue that has splintered the Democrat Party.
A staggering 70% of younger voters said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict, per the poll.
Among Democrats, 51% felt that Israel has been too aggressive, while 27% believed the Jewish state’s retaliatory actions were justified, the survey showed.
Overall, 40% of registered voters approved of the president’s performance in office, compared to 57% who disapproved — marking the lowest approval rating recorded by NBC for Biden during his time in the White House.
Broadly speaking, only 33% of voters approved of Biden’s foreign policy, which was down 8 percentage points from September.
Biden’s stewardship over the economy had 38% approval, up 1 percentage point from September.
NBC is not alone in pegging Biden down against Trump in a 2024 matchup.
A flurry of polls both nationally and in battleground states also had Trump beating Biden in a general election. Trump — the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — was up 1.6 percentage points in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling.
A recent Stack Data Strategy survey of 15,000 people found Trump beating Biden in the Electoral College.
The election is still about a year out, slated for Nov. 5, 2024.
Biden’s campaign team has been downplaying the polls.
NBC also found Trump towering over his 2024 GOP rivals. He clinched 58% support, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 18%, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley at 13%, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 3%, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 3%.
The NBC poll was conducted from Nov. 10-14 among 1,000 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
It also featured a subset of 317 Republican primary voters with a 5.5 percentage point margin of error and a 311 Democratic subset with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.