After a week marked by an assassination attempt on his life and the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump’s approval ratings among Americans have risen while a majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to drop out of the race, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Trump’s approval rating jumped to 40% after last week’s events, his highest approval rating in four years, according to ABC News/Ipsos polls. For most of the past four years, it has hovered between 30% and 35%.
According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted at the time, Trump’s approval rating reached its highest level in nine years, at 42% in August 2020. At the same time, about half of Americans, or 51%, currently have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, according to the latest poll.
Donald Trump took the stage Thursday at the National Congress, just days after he was shot in the ear during a campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. During his 90-minute speech, he attacked Democrats and Biden on several issues, including immigration, despite initial calls for unity.
Biden’s approval rating is now lower than Trump’s, at 32%, with 55% holding an unfavorable view of the current president. Biden’s approval rating has barely budged over the past year. It stood at 33% in the first week of August 2023.
As Trump accepted his nomination in front of an appreciative crowd of Republican supporters, Biden faces growing pressure from Democrats in Congress to withdraw from the race.
That sentiment is shared by a majority of Democrats, the poll found, with 60 percent saying he should drop out of the race.
In fact, slightly more Republicans (44%) than Democrats (39%) believe the president should continue his campaign, echoing the belief among many in the Trump campaign that Biden would be easier to beat than another candidate.
More than half of Americans, or 55%, say they would be unhappy if Biden were the Democratic presidential nominee. By contrast, most Democrats, or 58%, would be happy if Biden were the nominee of their party.
When it comes to both candidates, 15% of Americans are “double haters,” holding an unfavorable opinion of both Trump and Biden, according to the poll.
Americans are confident that Trump will do a better job of unifying the country as president than Biden, by a seven-point margin, 38% to 31%. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they trust neither.
However, the poll also found that more Americans blame Trump than Biden for the risk of politically motivated violence in this country, 46% to 27%.
Several alternatives have been discussed in recent weeks to replace the Democratic candidate, and Vice President Kamala Harris is the one with the highest approval rating, 35%, according to the poll. Her approval rating is 46%.
However, other potential replacement candidates are less well known than Harris.
According to the poll, Harris is liked by 55% of black Americans and 38% of Hispanic Americans. By comparison, Biden is liked by 49% of black Americans and 35% of Hispanic Americans. Trump is liked by 15% of black Americans and 37% of Hispanic Americans.
Other Democrats who have been considered potential candidates to replace Biden, such as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, were much less well-known, even among Democrats.
The poll also looked at Sen. J.D. Vance for the first time after Trump named the Ohio senator as his running mate.
The new senator’s approval rating is 25%, with 31% unfavorable and 43% saying they don’t know him or have no opinion. Even among his Republican colleagues, 37% don’t know him well enough to give an opinion, while 56% view him favorably and only 6% unfavorably.
Thirty-five percent of Americans rate Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice presidential running mate as either excellent or good, and 32% rate it as less than good or poor. About the same percentage, 34%, didn’t know enough to give an opinion.
METHODOLOGY – This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using Ipsos’ probability-based KnowledgePanel® from July 19-20, 2024, in English and Spanish, among a national random sample of 1,141 U.S. adults with oversamples of Black and Hispanic respondents weighted to their correct proportions in the general population. The results have a margin of sampling error of 3.1 percentage points, including design effect, for the full sample. Sampling error is not the only source of differences in polls. Partisan splits are 31-29-30 percent, Democrat-Republican-Independent. See key poll results and methodology details here.
ABC News’ Dan Merkle and Ken Goldstein contributed to this report.
