Trump tops Biden head-to-head by 4 points in new poll

President Joe Biden trailed Donald Trump in a Wall Street Journal poll published Saturday, adding to scores of polls forecasting a tough election cycle for the president.

In a hypothetical one-on-one general election matchup, Trump beat out Biden by 4 percentage points among registered voters surveyed across the country by the Journal, 47 percent to 43 percent.

When five third-party and independent candidates were included to the mix, Trump’s lead widened to 6 percentage points, with 37 percent to Biden’s 31 percent. Among these other candidates, which shared a total 17 percent of the vote, independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had nearly half of their combined support, at 8 percent.

The poll also suggested a general dissatisfaction among voters with Biden — only 23 percent of respondents said his policies had helped them personally, while 53 percent said they had been hurt by his policies. Only 37 percent approved of Biden’s job performance while 61 percent expressed unfavorable views of the president.

The president has faced widespread questions about his age — he is 81, the oldest president in U.S. history — and calls to step down after his first term. Biden's campaign has pushed back against that suggestion, insisting that the president is the best candidate to defeat Trump.

Biden fueled those talks earlier this week, when he told reporters that he was not the only Democrat that could beat Trump, and that if Trump was not running, he might not have run either.

The poll of 1,500 registered voters was conducted from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4 by cellphone, landline and text-to-web. The margin of error was plus-or-minus 2.5 percentage points.