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President Donald Trump is ahead of President Joe Biden by 18 points in Iowa, according to a poll released on Monday.
A survey by the Des Moines Register and Mediacom Iowa revealed that Trump held 50 percent of the vote, with Biden at 32 percent. The poll included over 800 likely voters and was conducted after Trump’s recent New York grand jury conviction.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has qualified for the Iowa ballot, held 9 percent in the poll. All other choices were at 3 percent or below, with 3 percent responding that they were uncertain of the candidate they would support in the November presidential election.
Pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., stated that the results are important because they represent an ongoing decline of support for Biden.
“It’s not that that’s a lot of change,” she said. “It’s just that the direction is consistently downward.”
Political analyst Frank Luntz also noted that poll “is bad news for Biden in more competitive Midwestern states, like Wisconsin and Michigan.”
The poll also addressed the top issues Iowans disapprove of regarding President Biden’s leadership. Inflation ranked first, with 69 percent disapproving, while immigration (68 percent) and the war between Israel and Hamas (64 percent) ranked second and third.
Iowans also expressed an overwhelming view that the U.S. is headed down the “wrong track.” A total of 74 percent agreed from all parties, including 96 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats.
Trump won Iowa by eight points in 2016 and 10 points in 2020. He won the Iowa Republican caucus in January in dominant fashion, with media outlets projecting Trump as the winner less than an hour after results began coming in.
The 45th president continued by winning the New Hampshire primary, marking the first time in 48 years a non-incumbent Republican has won both states.
“I have now beaten the once very popular sitting Governor of Iowa, and the once fairly popular sitting Governor of New Hampshire – and now BOTH are extremely unpopular within their States, and within the Republican Party!” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
Trump has since dominated the Republican primaries, becoming the presumptive GOP presidential candidate ahead of this summer’s Republican National Convention. The support comes despite his ongoing legal battles and upcoming sentencing in his New York case just days ahead of the convention.
