According to recent polling data in several battleground states, from two separate pollsters, former President Donald Trump is leading President Biden by several points in races that could decide the presidency in 2024.
Yes, it’s early, and polls are garbage, but let’s discuss it anyway.
New York Magazine’s Intelligencer wrote late last week what basically amounts to an alarm bell for Democrats, at least when it concerns battleground states where Biden is thought to be more competitive than it appears he actually is. Emphasis in bold for the key data points:
We’ve now gotten a taste of that landscape via two big batches of state general-election trial heats from Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult. Emerson seems to have focused much of its polling on states with down-ballot races, so the firm is mostly confirming that Trump is predictably far ahead of Biden in red states like Montana (by 21 points), Tennessee (by 33 points), and Wyoming (53 points). But Emerson also has polls of Wisconsin (Trump 42 percent, Biden 40 percent), Michigan (Biden 44 percent, Trump 43 percent), and a Pennsylvania shocker (Trump 45 percent, Biden 36 percent).
The new Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls are squarely centered on the seven states that were closest in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The results show Trump leading among registered voters in Arizona (47 percent to 43 percent), Georgia (48 percent to 43 percent), North Carolina (47 percent to 43 percent), Pennsylvania (46 percent to 45 percent), and Wisconsin (46 percent to 44 percent). Biden leads in Nevada (46 percent to 43 percent), and the two candidates are tied in Michigan (at 44 percent). Taking the margins of error into account, Trump has small leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and the candidates are statistically tied in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Emerson College polling has been consistently generous to Trump so these numbers could best be discounted as a toss-up. Bloomberg/Morning Consult has been a little more down the middle but also tilted a little favorably toward Trump in 2020.
However, all that being said, these are not the numbers Democrats want to see running against a guy with 91 criminal indictments, or so they keep repeating. Trump was supposed to be buried by frivolous politically-motivated indictments by now yet he seems to be coasting toward the nomination with his opponents serving as little more than speed bumps along the way.
Maybe it’s the “hate ’em both” voter slice that will put Trump over the top next year:
It’s pretty likely that neither candidate is going to be wildly popular by November 2024, so the ultimate deciding factors could be (a) how many voters who dislike both Trump and Biden decide to turn out and (b) which candidate they prefer. Trump actually won the “hate ‘em both” vote by similar margins in 2016 and 2020, but lost in part because this segment of the electorate was a lot smaller in the latter year.
Hillary Clinton was… not likable, to put it mildly.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, was seen as friendly Uncle Joe from Scranton in 2020. Just an “awe-shucks” kind of guy trying to perform his duty as a public servant. He spoke of unity, civility, a growing economy, and making America respected on the world stage again.
None of those things have happened, of course, with Biden dividing the country more than ever, the economy in a whirlwind, and America losing clout internationally in every region of the globe.
Also, a majority of voters now see through the “awe-shucks” facade to a politician who has lived on self-enrichment by selling influence and his name to the highest foreign bidder. Joe Biden is no longer Scranton Joe, he’s become DC Joe and more voters are starting to figure that out. The Associated Press recently choked down its own poll numbers a few days back admitting that Biden has a problem with appearing unethical to many voters:
Ethical concerns are casting a shadow over President Joe Biden as he seeks reelection amid investigations into his son Hunter and an impeachment inquiry, with a poll showing that 35% of U.S. adults believe the president himself has done something illegal.
An additional 33% say they think the Democratic president behaved unethically, but not illegally. And 30% say Joe Biden did nothing wrong, according to the poll. The results of the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reflect both a vast political divide and skepticism about the morality of government leaders.
That’s a combined 66% that say Joe Biden has done something illegal or at the very least did something unethical. Those numbers are a far cry from when Democrats would downplay and ignore Joe’s hair-sniffing propensity by pointing out how honest and normal he otherwise was.
Whatever the case, Biden’s got a swing state problem and if it persists into next year, Democrats will be scrambling to find a replacement.
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