Don’t look now, but former President Donald Trump appears to be opening up a consistent lead in national polls against incumbent President Joe Biden, with Trump beating Biden 47.2 percent to 43.7 percent, according to the latest average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com.
In fact, for more than a month, Trump has led Biden in 20 out of the last 26 national polls taken. Biden led four of them, and two were tied. The leads vary in the polls, anywhere from 10 points to 1 point, but begin to tell a very important story with little more than a week to go until the 2024 New Year begins: a larger plurality or maybe even a majority of Americans would rather see Donald Trump be president than Joe Biden beginning in 2025.
Observers would do well to note that national polls do not track candidates’ performance in individual states, they track how a candidate would fare in the popular vote, which Republicans have not won since 2004. No Republican has ever won the popular vote but then lost the election in U.S. history, although Democrats have suffered that fate on numerous occasions, most recently in 2016 and in 2000.
Which tells you how well the Electoral College is going for Biden at the moment, which is to say it’s not going very well at all.
Looking at the swing states that Trump carried in 2016 but Biden carried in 2020, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, Trump is leading by 4.8 points, 1.4 points, 5.2 points and 4.8 points, respectively, and Wisconsin is tied, according to the RealClearPolitics.com averages of these particular states.
Now, a good chunk of this is Biden faring very poorly in his approval — 55.6 percent disapprove of Biden and just 40.3 percent approve — particularly on economic issues as inflation eats up Americans’ incomes.
But the other part of it is Trump doing very well, particularly in the Republican primary, where out of more than 200 national polls taken, Trump has led all but one of them, and in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, he has led every single poll taken in Iowa and South Carolina, and has led all but two polls in New Hampshire (a couple of University of New Hampshire polls had Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leading a two-way race in early 2022).
Now, all this is quite prospective, as not a single vote has been cast yet, and as usual, a lot can change in politics very quickly.
In 2020, Trump appeared to be cruising to reelection based on standard conventional factors, but then the Covid pandemic struck, resulting in 25 million jobs temporarily being lost amid economic lockdowns, and mail-in ballots were widely utilized, favoring Democrats.
Or, in 1948, incumbent Democratic President Harry Truman was trailing in polls against Republican Thomas Dewey, but then won the election relatively easily in hindsight.
Or, in 2016, polls appeared to favor Hillary Clinton, even in swing states, but Trump overperformed at the ballot box, leading to the “hidden” Trump voter conundrum, where Trump supporters would disguise their support for Trump when called by a pollster.
Of those three examples, the 2016 and 2020 examples might be the most troubling for the Biden campaign, because it implies that however far ahead the polls show Trump, he might be leading by even more. In 2016, polls suggested Trump would get 43.8 percent of the popular vote, but instead he got 46.1 percent. And in 2020, polls said Trump would get 44 percent of the popular vote, but wound up with 46.9 percent.
On average, both years understated Trump’s support at the ballot box by about 2.5 percentage points. If that holds true, then at 47.2 percent, Trump might nearly be above 50 percent in a very real sense in the two-way race. Now, to be fair, Robert Kennedy and Cornell West are also running in reality, and poll significantly, and it remains to be seen the impact they will have on the race, but so far, Trump has led every four-way race poll taken so far as well tracked by RealClearPolitics.com by an average of 5.2 percentage points.
Again, the election is still several months away, and a lot can change, but especially given Democratic prosecutors attempts to imprison Trump in four separate legal trials on criminal charges — what else might cause Trump to sink in the polls? — there is a very clear pattern emerging in the 2024 election: Donald Trump is the frontrunner.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
