More than half of American voters think the U.S government needs major reforms or a total overhaul, new polling shows.
A New York Times-Siena College poll, the paper’s first national survey of the 2022 midterm cycle, found that 58 percent of respondents felt deep change in government is needed.
Republicans are unhappy with the election system, fueled by unfounded concerns about the 2020 presidential election, according to the report.
Democrats, on the other hand, are upset with the inefficacy of their elected officials, even with a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House.
President Biden earned a 33 percent approval rating among all respondents, and 64 percent of Democrats said they don’t want a second Biden term.
Despite low approval ratings and meager support for a reelection campaign, Biden beat out former President Trump by 3 percentage points in a hypothetical 2024 match-up, 44 percent to 41 percent.
The poll comes as Biden grapples with the highest inflation in 40 years, while Trump has been on the defensive as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack holds public hearings.
Just 19 percent of Republicans think that former president Donald Trump’s fraud claims about the 2020 election “went so far that he threatened American democracy,” compared with 92 percent of Democrats.
The Times-Siena poll’s findings matched other recent polls: a Yahoo News-YouGov poll released Wednesday found that just 18 percent of Americans support a 2024 run for Biden, but that Biden is leading Trump by 1 point in a hypothetical 2024 race.
A recent Harvard CAPS–Harris poll also found that 71 percent of Americans were against a Biden rerun, while 61 percent were against a 2024 Trump bid.
The former president is also facing obstacles in his own party: just 49 percent of Republicans who plan to vote in the presidential primaries said they’d pick Trump, with nearly half the party backing another GOP candidate, the Times-Siena poll found.
Trump’s main challenge is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who clinched a quarter of the respondents’ support in the poll.
The Harvard-Harris poll found that DeSantis would grab 36 percent of Republicans if the former president wasn’t in the running.