Two New Polls Find Trouble for Trump on the Economy
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Two New Polls Find Trouble for Trump on the Economy

@realDonaldTrump

As the Trump administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) scramble to see if they can reach a roughly $2 trillion stimulus deal — while Senate Republicans look to vote on a smaller, $500 billion plan — voters say they back a bigger package.

In a new poll from The New York Times and Sienna College, 72% of likely voters said they support a $2 trillion plan that would extend enhanced unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most households and provide more aid to state and local governments.

“In a sign of how broad the support is for additional relief, and the risk congressional Republicans may be taking if they block further spending, even 56 percent of Republicans said they backed another $2 trillion package,” the Times’s Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin write.

The Times poll and one released Tuesday by the Financial Times and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation both find other trouble for President Trump.

Joe Biden holds a nine-point lead over Trump in the Times poll, 50%-41%. The likely voters surveyed said they prefer the former vice president’s position to the president’s on a broad range of issues — including the economy, long a strength for Trump.

New York Times chart

The New York Times poll finds that voters are now split, 48%-47%, on whether Trump or Biden would do a better job on the economy.

The Financial Times-Peterson poll finds that 46% of Americans believe the president policies have hurt the economy, greater than the 44% who say Trump’s policies have helped. That’s a sharp swing from March, when Trump enjoyed an 11-point net positive rating on the question. (The Fiscal Times is an editorially independent organization funded by the late Peter G. Peterson and his family.)

Less than a third of those surveyed by the FT said they expect the economy to fully recover from the pandemic within a year, the lowest level since the newspaper first asked the question in April.

“Part of the shift away from Mr. Trump on the economy may stem from voters’ urgent hunger for new relief spending from the federal government — which Mr. Trump has nominally endorsed but which he has not sought actively to extract from congressional Republicans,” Burns and Martin write in The New York Times.

A majority of voters also supports Biden’s call for a public health insurance option, his $2 trillion climate change plan and a national mandate requiring face coverings. On the coronavirus pandemic, the Times poll finds that a narrow majority of voters (51%) believe the worst is yet to come while 37% say the worst is behind us. On who they trust to handle the pandemic, voters favor Biden by 12 points.

The New York Times poll of 987 likely voters was conducted from October 15 to 18 and has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. The FT-Peterson Poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted between October 8 and 11. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Read more at The New York Times, the Financial Times or the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

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