WASHINGTON — President Trump’s erratic performance in office and his deteriorating standing in the polls is posing a grave threat to his party’s Senate majority, imperiling incumbents in crucial swing states and undermining Republican prospects in one of the few states they had hoped to gain a seat, according to a new poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.
The poll showed that the same voters who are fleeing the president — highly educated white Americans, many of them once-reliable Republicans — are providing an advantage to Democratic Senate candidates. Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus and his bombastic response to protests over racial justice have made him an underdog against Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, who led the president by 14 percentage points nationally in the Times poll.
And in an era when Senate races increasingly mirror the presidential preference of a given state, there is little Ms. McSally and Mr. Tillis may be able to do to overcome Mr. Trump’s current drag on their party. The president trails Mr. Biden by seven percentage points in Arizona and nine in North Carolina. Mr. Trump is capturing the support of only 41 percent of Arizona voters and 40 percent of North Carolinians.
The president’s prospects are even more dire in Michigan, where the poll shows he is losing to Mr. Biden by 11 points, capturing just 36 percent of the vote in a state he narrowly carried four years ago.
Taken together, the three battleground states paint a grim picture for Republicans right now — and suggest that if Mr. Trump does not arrest his fall he could hand Democrats control of both the presidency and the Senate next year.
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Article URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/us/politics/trump-senate-republicans-poll.html