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By Josh Christenson

May 17, 2023 | 4:03pm

President Biden would expand his 2020 margin of victory over former President Donald Trump if a rematch were held today, according to a new poll exclusively shared with The Post Wednesday.

The WPA Intelligence survey of 1,571 registered voters found Biden, 80, leading 76-year-old Trump 47% to 40%. By comparison, Biden defeated Trump by 4.5 percentage points in the 2020 popular vote, while former President Barack Obama won re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by 3.9 percentage points in 2012.

The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5% and was conducted between May 10 and 13, also showed independent voters backing Biden by a whopping 14 percentage points, up from the nine percentage points by which the Democrat won independents three years ago, per the Pew Research Center.

Wednesdays poll also showed Democrats leading generic down-ballot races 47% to 42% with Trump at the top of the Republican ticket.

Despite the grim reading for Trump supporters, the poll also shows Biden remains vulnerable to defeat next year.

Just 46% of voters approve and 54% of voters disapprove of the job the president is doing, with 42% strongly disapproving.

Only 39% of registered voters have a favorable impression of the commander-in-chief, with 54% having an unfavorable impression.

Also, just 22% believe the country is on the right track, whereas 78% believe it is on the wrong track.

However, Trumps ratings are even worse, with 32% of registered voters having a favorable impression compared to 62% with unfavorable impressions.

The 45th president fared even worse among independents, with just 21% having a favorable impression and 71% having an unfavorable impression.

Despite Joe Bidens unpopularity, our poll found that he would win re-election in a rematch against Donald Trump by a bigger margin than the one he had in 2020, said WPA principal Amanda Iovino, who oversaw the polling.

Its clear from the data that Trumps standing with Independents has weakened considerably since the 2020 election and that he has failed to attract new voters. This should surprise no one, as it is entirely consistent with last years election results among Trump-backed candidates in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and other states.

WPA Intelligence CEO Chris Wilson is an adviser to Never Back Down, a super PAC aligned with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expected bid for the presidency.

The polling firm said Wilson was not involved with the survey and the poll was not sponsored by Never Back Down or its associates.

The president last enjoyed a 7-point margin over Trump in a USA Today/Suffolk poll from December, which surveyed 1,000 registered voters nationwide.

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Biden up 7 points over Donald Trump in 2024 popular vote, poll shows - New York Post

Since Donald Trump is the firmly established front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, that raises the question: How does the media cover him over the next 18 months?

This issue was crystalized by CNNs decision to interview the former president live before a raucously supportive audience. He ran roughshod over the anchor, Kaitlan Collins, spewing out lies, stirring up the crowd and swatting down every attempt to hold him accountable for his denial and deceit.

Critics from the left savaged the network for giving Trump such a platform. CNN should be ashamed of themselves, fumed Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. And even CNNs own media writer Oliver Darcy wrote, Its hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.

Darcy should look harder. CNN made two major mistakes in the format they used, but their basic instincts were correct. As Anderson Cooper chastised his own CNN audience about their aversion to Trump: Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away? Media critic Jack Shafer added in Politico: A genuine news outlet cant avert its eyes during a campaign just because a candidate is malevolent, duplicitous, cruel and deceitful.

News organizations have long grappled with how to treat Trump, who breaks all the rules by lying incessantly while never correcting his falsehoods or apologizing for them. He might have been an amateur politician in 2016, but he was a professional TV performer who knew instinctively how to keep the cameras red light on.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera, writes New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings.

That made Trump, in his words, a ratings magnet, and the networks ate it up, carrying many of his rallies live. Eventually, however, the mainstream media began to realize how badly it had been manipulated. The Times started branding Trumps falsehoods as lies, and CNN head Jeff Zucker admitted that hed made a major mistake in broadcasting Trumps appearances unfiltered.

That vigilant posture only grew more aggressive during Trumps White House years, as the mainstream media felt it had to abandon doctrines that could be called false equivalency or bothsides-ism. As the Times bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller told me, We are much tougher about calling out falsehoods from the president. ... Trump has uttered so many obvious falsehoods, so often, that to just report what he said, like we have covered other presidents, seems like a falsehood in itself.

But when CNNs parent company was bought by Discovery last year, its new bosses decided the network had strayed too far to the left and needed to adopt a less adversarial stance toward Trump. That decision led to the town hall, and in some ways, it did accomplish its purpose revealing the true Trump. By daring to commit journalism, wrote Shafer, the forum produced a bounty of information that just may damage Trump.

To take just a few examples: The former president described the insurrection on Jan. 6 as a beautiful day; he derided E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, as a whack job; he hailed the Dobbs decision canceling a national right to abortion as such a great victory.

Democrats are already mining Trumps statements for campaign gold, and President Biden summed up his core campaign message by tweeting, Its simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?

Still, CNN made some serious errors. The first was to put Trump on live, so his flame-throwing bombast could incinerate the stage. Live TV interviews will always favor those who prefer mendacity, writes media historian Michael Socolow in Slate. The formats structure significantly favors distribution of unproven allegations (and even falsehoods) over interjected corrections. The second error was to put Trump in front of an audience that would cheer on his mendacity and turn the event from a town hall into a tumultuous rally.

There is a proven model here: 60 Minutes, the program that has dominated TV ratings since 1968. They interview everybody, including Trump, but never live, so theres ample time and space to correct and control untruths. And these sit-downs are always one-on-one, no claque of supporters to distract or distort the conversation.

CNN was right to give Trump its microphone. It was wrong to let him hijack it. Thats an important lesson the press needs to learn going forward.

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STEVEN ROBERTS: How to cover Donald Trump | Opinion ... - Indiana Gazette

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak at midterm election rallies, in Dayton, Ohio, Nov. 7, 2022, and Tampa, Florida, Nov. 8, 2022, in a combination of file photos.

Gaelen Morse | Reuters;Marco Bello | Reuters

As former President Donald Trump blinks on the abortion debate, his likely top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is taking an opportunity to fight him on a key 2024 election issue that is shaping up to be as divisive in the Republican primary as it will be in the general.

DeSantis, who is expected to publicly announce his presidential plans in the coming weeks, took a direct swing at Trump on Tuesday after the current GOP presidential front-runner suggested that Florida's new six-week abortion ban was "too harsh."

Asked about that remark, DeSantis said the legislation he signed is something that "probably 99% of pro-lifers support."

The governor noted that Trump had dodged on whether he would back that bill.

"As a Florida resident, you know, he didn't give an answer about, 'Would you have signed the heartbeat bill that Florida did, that had all the exceptions that people talk about?'" he said.

"The Legislature put it in, I signed the bill, I was proud to do it," DeSantis said, adding, "He won't answer whether he would sign it or not."

The governor's remarks at a bill-signing event marked a rare rebuttal to Trump, who has spent months bludgeoning his potential primary rival with attacks that have mostly gone unanswered.

Trump was a main catalyst for last year's lethal blow to federal abortion rights, as he appointed three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. That seismic ruling made good on Trump's 2016 campaign promise to put abortion regulations back in the hands of the states.

It was the biggest-ever win for conservatives whose opposition to abortion protections has been a rallying cry for decades. But it drew a ferocious backlash.

Many voters, incensed by the sudden loss of what had been a constitutional right for nearly five decades, flocked to the polls in the November midterms, and pro-abortion rights Democrats broadly outperformed expectations that had strongly favored Republicans. Surveys showed the high court's ruling galvanized turnout among young voters, women and those voting in a general election for the first time.

Now, as he looks for another term in the White House, Trump has shown comparatively little interest in flaunting his record on abortion. When pressed to detail what his abortion agenda would look like if he won in 2024, the pugilistic ex-president has opted for a softer, less committed tone than some of his competitors.

Trump himself underlined that contrast when asked in a recent interview about the six-week abortion ban that DeSantis had just signed in Florida.

"Many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh," Trump said in an interview published Monday with The Messenger. He demurred on whether he felt the same way, or whether he would sign a similar ban.

"I'm looking at all alternatives. I'm looking at many alternatives," Trump said.

He was similarly hard to pin down in a recent CNN town hall, declining to say if he would sign a federal abortion ban or what other policies he might favor instead.

"What I will do is negotiate so that people are happy," Trump said, while defending his efforts that led to Roe's reversal.

Trump may be speaking with a general-election audience in mind: National polls tend to show most voters support abortion rights, especially following the Supreme Court's ruling. Surveys also show voters consider the issue extremely important to them.

President Joe Biden has taken notice: His reelection announcement video slammed what he described as Republican "MAGA extremists" who are bent on "dictating what health care decisions women can make."

But DeSantis' willingness to hit Trump from the right on abortion could also be a strategic one. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found a strong majority of likely Republican primary voters, 68% to 27%, supported banning most abortions after six weeks.

Those numbers could be emboldening the governor, who otherwise has appeared to go out of his way to avoid alienating the swath of Republican voters still highly sensitive to criticism of Trump.

Other candidates, both those who have declared their campaigns and those who are considering taking the plunge, seem to be making their own calculations.

Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, has reaffirmed his staunchly anti-abortion views as he appears to be inching toward his own White House bid. He has also come out against a widely used abortion pill, mifepristone, saying he wants the medication taken off the market.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who launched a Republican presidential exploratory committee last month, has said that he would limit abortions to "no more than 15 weeks" of pregnancy if elected president.

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, meanwhile, distinguished herself by addressing the abortion debate head on, saying in a speech that the next president must find a "national consensus."

Read more here:
Ron DeSantis just made it clear he's going to fight Trump on abortion - CNBC

Last week, anonymous sources made an extremely bold claim in the pages of Page Six. Donald and Melania Trump, those sources claimed, are closer and more bonded than ever. And while, sure, love works in mysterious ways, that declaration struck us as fairly improbable given that not only has Melania long appeared to hate her husbands guts, but she appeared to hate them as recently as last month. Also, if the ex-president is supposedly a new man who demonstrates love and affection toward his wifehes not doing a great job of showing it!

On Sunday, Trump celebrated Mothers Day by writing on Truth Social: Happy Mothers Day to ALL, in particular the Mothers, Wives and Lovers of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, and Communists who are doing everything within their power to destroy and obliterate our once great Country. Please make these complete Lunatics and Maniacs Kinder, Gentler, Softer and, most importantly, Smarter, so that we can, quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! He did not mention his current wife, i.e. the mother of his fifth and youngest child.

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Of course, this type of holiday commemoration is typical Trump. Last Easter, he celebrated the resurrection of Christ by writing: HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING THOSE THAT DREAM ENDLESSLY OF DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF DREAMING ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. On July Fourth, in 2014, he took to Twitter to tell his followers, Happy 4th of July to everyone, including the haters and losers! And a year prior, he famously tweeted, on 9/11: I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.

Anyway, nothing says love like ignoring your wife on Mothers Day.

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Donald Trump Celebrates Mothers Day in the Most Donald Trump Way Possible - Vanity Fair

Though the Aramco Team Series is a Saudi Arabian event at the Trump International Golf Club, South Florida product Lexi Thompson gets a chance to play in her backyard this week and on her home course owned by one of her favorite people.

Thompson, a Coral Springs native who now lives in Delray Beach, shot to fame when she was 12, winning a USGA qualifier to earn a spot in the 2007 U.S. Womens Open, becoming the youngest to do so.

Crediting her two golf-playing brothers, Thompson turned pro at 15 and won her first LPGA event at 16.

At 28, the 6-footer has 11 LPGA titles, still going strong, though she has taken a respite in 2023, playing few events.

The Aramco Series, now in its third year, is part team event, part individual tournament with its sponsor a Saudi Arabian oil company.

The format calls for a foursome of three pros from either the LPGA or Ladies European Tour linked with one amateur. The tournament takes place Friday to Sunday at the suburban West Palm Beach course.

The team event is Friday and Saturday and the individual title is up for grabs in Sundays final round. (The scores of the pros are added up from the three days of rounds).

The tournament is the second Aramco event of 2023 after Marchs Singapore event won by Lydia Ko, who also is entered here. The tournament continues in London, Hong Kong and Riyadh.

More: Lexi Thompson in photos through the years

In October, Thompson won the first Aramco event on American soil, held in The Bronx at Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. Thompson is now on home turf trying for an American sweep.

Thursday, the pre-tournament pro-am will be held and is closed to the public and media. Sources indicated former President Donald Trump is expected to compete.

Thompson held a news conference at Trump International, then conducted this Q&A with The Palm Beach Post.

Its always nice to have an additional event in Florida. Theres so many golfers based here, especially in the Palm Beach/Jupiter area. We have one in Orlando and Naples. We have a few here and hopefully, well get a few more. Any Florida events we get, I look forward to them. Usually, because I get to drive and this ones very close only about 25 minutes from my home and I practice out of here. It would mean the world to me to defend the title. I have a lot of family, friends coming up to support me, so itll be a blast of a week.

Honestly, these events are put on so well and Aramco has been a huge supporter of the Ladies European Tour and golf in general. Were all out there playing a game we love. Having the support from sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Aramco, its great to be able to play here.

Ive played with Mr. Trump quite a bit being out here 10-plus years. Ive seen him out a lot, played a lot of rounds with him. Hes a big supporter of womens golf and my family as well. Were forever gratefulof that friendship.

He drives it straight. Im always on his team. We make a good team. Hes a pretty good golfer not too bad. And he absolutely loves the game. Just a big supporter of golf.

There hasnt been any talks about it. Im focusing on the tournaments I can play in this year. Not much we can do about it. Well continue to play our butts off.Theres still enough going on in the golf world and see how far we can take our tour.

Honestly, its about living a life, spending time with friends and family at home. Being able to go to bed and not have a 5:30 a.m. wakeup call and have to get out there to training and to a tee time. Just being able to do what I want. Even though Im out there practicing, I can come out here for a few hours and then lay by my pool for multiple hours. Or go out. Whatever I want to do. Its very important to have that balance. Im so family-oriented, time away from my family does more harm than me being out there playing multiple days.

I would say its a little bit of an advantage being my home course, but you still have to go out there and hit the golf shots. And the weather does look very nice coming into the week. Very hot. But Im used to it. I just played nine, but this is getting to be summer weather. It feels like its very humid out there, but just have to drink a lot of water.

Im out here pretty much every day if not every other day. And its just a very difficult golf course and they have it set up difficult yardage-wise. So its a ball-striker golf course. You have to definitely commit to your lines off the tee. And it requires a lot of really good tee shots. Its very scenic, a lot of water, palm trees. Its in the best shape Ive ever seen. But you have to really commit to your lines, sometimes play more aggressively because you want shorter clubs coming into some of the greens because some are elevated, some have a lot of slope.

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Lexi Thompson Q&A: How she's 'forever grateful' of friendship with ... - Golfweek