According to recent polling, the 2024 presidential election is a toss-up. For pretty much every national poll showing Trump ahead, there’s another poll showing Biden ahead. Plenty more put the race at a tie.
This technically makes the anticipated general election matchup between Donald Trump and Joe Biden a dead heat. Of course, that’s not entirely true. Some extra context is needed. Donald Trump has consistently outperformed the polls — particularly national polling. Trump trailed Biden by an average of 7.6 points in the RealClearPolitics average in 2020, but Biden only beat Trump by 4.5 points in the national popular vote. But even that is misleading because the election was actually decided by a few thousand votes in a few battleground states.
What this tells us is that Trump heads into the 2024 election in a much stronger position than he did in 2020 — a truly unique year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which not only saw illegal changes to election laws in various states but unprecedented biased coverage from the media about Trump’s response to the pandemic. But national polling is the least of Biden’s problems.
New polling from the Daily Telegraph shows that Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden in four of the six battleground states that decided the last election. According to the Telegraph poll, Trump leads in Arizona (44%-39%), Florida (44%-39%), Georgia (43%-40%), and North Carolina (43%-38%). Trump and Biden are tied in Michigan, with each getting 41%, and Biden edges out Trump in Pennsylvania (43%-42%).
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Other polls have observed the swing in favor of Trump in battleground states as well. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump holds a slight advantage in the seven states that played a decisive role in the 2020 presidential election: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, and Michigan. In these states, Trump enjoys 41% support, while Biden has 35%, with 24% of voters yet to make up their minds.
New polls from Emerson College Polling support this trend. In the latest Emerson poll, Trump leads by two points in Wisconsin and by nine points in Pennsylvania. In fairness, that Pennsylvania poll feels like an outlier. I certainly would not bet that Trump would beat Biden in the Keystone State by that much, but I do think Trump could win the state by one or two points, considering the state of the nation today, as well as other factors. In fact, a Quinnipiac poll from last week shows Trump beating Biden in Pennsylvania 47%-45%.
Like many other polls, the Telegraph poll shows that voters in the battleground states largely agree that Biden is too old to run for office again and believe that Trump is in better physical and mental health. These states also agree that Trump is the stronger leader who will be tough on China and get the economy roaring again. They also see Trump as the candidate who understands the problems America is facing.
The Telegraph poll also suggests that Biden will lose more support by having Robert F. Kennedy on the ballot. “When Mr. Kennedy’s name is included on a hypothetical ballot paper, Mr. Trump polls ahead of Mr. Biden in five of the six swing states polled, and is tied with Mr. Biden in Pennsylvania, the sixth,” the paper reports.
“Democrats need to think hard about whether to stick with Biden as their candidate. Our polling shows that they cannot expect a rerun of 2020 to have the same result,” Philip van Scheltinga, the Director of Research at Redfield & Wilton Strategies, which conducted the poll for the Telegraph, said. “If they run the same strategy as they did in 2020 — counting on voters’ distaste for Trump — they will lose.”
