Trump favorability rises following shooting, majority of Americans want Biden to end campaign: POLL

Following a week that included an assassination attempt on his life and the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump's favorability rating among Americans rose 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 favorability rating increased to 40% following last week's events, marking his highest favorability rating in four years of ABC News/Ipsos polling. For most of the last four years, it has hovered in the low to mid 30% range.

Its high over the last nine years was 42% in August of 2020 according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted then. At the same time, about half of Americans, 51%, currently view Trump unfavorably, according to this most recent poll.

Trump took the stage on Thursday at the RNC, just days after a bullet grazed his ear at a campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. During his 90-minute acceptance speech, he went after Democrats and Biden over several issues including immigration, despite initial calls for unity.

Biden's favorability rating is now lower than Trump's, standing at 32% with 55% having an unfavorable view of the current president. There has been virtually no movement in Biden's favorability rating over the last year. It stood at 33% during the first week of August 2023.

While Trump accepted his nomination among an adoring crowd of Republican supporters, Biden faces mounting pressure from Democrats on the Hill to bow out of the race.

According to the poll, it is a sentiment that is shared by a majority of Democrats with 60% saying he should drop out of the race.

In fact, slightly more Republicans, 44%, than Democrats, 39%, think the president should continue his campaign, echoing the belief of many in the Trump campaign that Biden would be easier to beat than an alternative candidate.

Over half of the American public, 55%, say they would be dissatisfied with Biden as the presidential Democratic nominee. On the other hand, most Democrats, 58%, would be satisfied with Biden being their party's nominee.

When it comes to both candidates, 15% of Americans are "double haters," holding unfavorable views of both Trump and Biden, according to the poll.

Americans trust Trump to do a better job than Biden uniting the country as president by a seven-point margin, 38% to 31%. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they trust neither.

However, the poll also finds that more Americans blame Trump than Biden for the risk of politically motivated violence in this country, 46% to 27%.

Several alternatives have been floated as a possible replacement on the Democratic ticket in recent weeks, and Vice President Kamala Harris has the strongest favorability rating among them, 35%, the poll finds. Her unfavorability rating is 46%.

However, the other possible replacement candidates are less well-known than Harris.

Harris's favorability rating is 55% among Black Americans and 38% among Hispanic Americans, according to the poll. By comparison, Biden's favorability is 49% among Black Americans and 35% among Hispanic Americans. Trump's favorability among Black Americans is 15%, and it's 37% among Hispanic Americans.

Other Democrats who were assessed as potential candidates to replace Biden, such as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were much less well known even among Democrats.

The poll also looked at Sen. JD Vance for the first time after Trump nominated the Ohio senator to be his running mate.

The freshman senator's favorability rating is 25% with 31% unfavorable and 43% saying they don't know or have no opinion. Even among his fellow Republicans, 37% do not know enough about him to offer an opinion, while 56% view him favorably and only 6% unfavorably.

Thirty-five percent of Americans rate Trump's selection of Vance as his vice presidential running mate as either excellent or good, and 32% say it's not so good or poor. About the same number, 34%, did not know enough to offer an opinion.

METHODOLOGY – This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using the probability-based Ipsos KnowledgePanel® July 19-20, 2024, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 1,141 U.S. adults with oversamples of Black and Hispanic respondents weighted to their correct proportions in the general population. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.1 points, including the design effect, for the full sample. Sampling error is not the only source of differences in polls. Partisan divisions are 31-29-30 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents. See the poll's topline results and details on the methodology here.

ABC News' Dan Merkle and Ken Goldstein contributed to this report.