In his third consecutive election as the Republican Party’s nominee for president, former President Donald Trump is something he’s never been before: The favorite. Either by his own strength, President Joe Biden’s weakness, or some combination of the two, Trump would very likely win the election if it were held today.
The National Polls
Historically, Trump has been the underdog. When he first declared for the Republican nomination in 2015, he was mocked as a joke candidate. That summer he trailed leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton nationally by massive margins — between 10 and 20 points. As the Fall began and people realized that Trump was deadly serious about running for president, he closed the gap with Clinton but remained stubbornly behind her nearly all the way through the campaign. (READ MORE: Grumpy Old Man Mumbles State of the Union)
Trump’s deficit in 2020 was even more marked. While he briefly pulled into the lead against Clinton twice in 2016 and often remained right on her heels, at no point during the entire 2020 cycle did he get within 4 points of Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Usually, Joe led by far more. Throughout the entirety of the 2020 presidential cycle going back to the 2017 trial heats, Trump led Biden in just five national polls.
The picture in 2024 could not be more different. Trump has led in 16 national polls in the last month alone. He took the lead against Biden in the average back in September, and he’s yet to relinquish it. A New York Times headline about the newspaper’s own poll with Siena College reads, “Voters Doubt Biden’s Leadership and Favor Trump.” It’s hard to take away any other conclusion from what is regarded as the best survey in the business. The topline result, that Trump leads Biden by 4 percentage points with likely voters, 48 percent to 44 percent, is bad enough.
What’s worse — for Biden — is that the poll shows the Democratic coalition fraying from underneath the president. Ten percent of voters who said they supported Biden in 2020 now said they’re for Trump. According to the poll, this change is driven by a titanic shift away from Biden and towards Trump with nonwhite voters, especially those without a college degree. Non-white voters without a college degree only favor Biden over Trump by six percentage points, 47-41, despite having backed Biden in 2020 by nearly 50 percentage points. The 2016 election saw white voters without a college degree, many of whom had supported President Barack Obama, surge towards the insurgent Trump. These “Obama-Trump” voters became an object of cultural fascination. The Biden-Trump voter threatens to overshadow them — by a lot.
The Electoral College
It is true that we elect a president via the electoral college and not the popular vote, as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton learned the hard way. So what is the state of the race in the swing states? (READ MORE: Biden Is George III. What Does That Make Trump?)
There are seven swing states that could plausibly vote for either candidate and decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina. The first five supported Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020. Nevada voted against Trump, twice, by narrow margins, while North Carolina has remained marginally but stubbornly red at the presidential level since Obama won it in 2008.
According to RealClearPolitics’s aggregate, Trump leads in Nevada by 7.7 percent, Georgia by 6.5 percent, North Carolina by 5.7 percent, Arizona by 5.5 percent, and Michigan by 3.6 percent. If Trump were to win these five states in addition to those he won in 2020, he would win the election with 283 electoral votes — he needs just 270 to win. Trump also has a more modest lead in Wisconsin (1 point), while Biden holds a 0.8-point lead in Pennsylvania.
States Biden won convincingly in 2020 like Virginia and Minnesota could also be more competitive. Biden leads in Virginia by 4.3 percent, and in Minnesota by 3 percent. Meanwhile, one-time battlegrounds like Ohio and Iowa seem likely to stick by Trump by large margins.
Joe Biden’s Cratering Image
Why is this happening? Donald Trump is not popular and he never has been. Popular opinion of him has been relatively steady since leaving the presidency; roughly 42-43 percent of Americans view him favorably and 53-54 percent view him unfavorably.
What has changed is Joe Biden. Biden was more liked than disliked during the 2020 campaign. While Clinton and Trump were both historically unpopular candidates in 2016, Trump was always disliked more. Now in 2024, by any metric you use, Trump is more popular than Biden. (READ MORE: Biden Stays Silent Despite Spike in Anti-Catholic Attacks)
The incumbent president’s job approval is lower than Trump’s at this point in his presidency. He has especially damaging low marks on the economy and immigration, two issues where Trump is well positioned. Of course, Biden’s chief weakness, his age, is a major factor as well. Supermajorities of Americans, including his own voters, say he’s too old to do the job. Unlike the economy, Biden can’t even sit back and hope forces beyond his control get him out of it. Just like the rest of us, he gets older every day.
Of course, Democrats can take solace in one thing. That Trump would win the election if it were held tomorrow is an interesting factoid, but it is ultimately irrelevant. The election won’t be tomorrow, unless you happen to be reading this on Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. In that case, you should probably make a plan to vote if you haven’t already.
But what can Democrats do? Everybody knows what they think about Trump. If anything, the story of Trump’s dominance over American politics has been of gradual accommodation and normalization. Unusually for a president, Trump’s average job approval in office ticked up each year. Perhaps the seemingly newfound Trump nostalgia is simply a continuation of that trend.
Biden isn’t the cipherous alternative to a president overseeing a once-in-a-generation pandemic anymore. He’s the man now. He can’t run a basement campaign against his own policies; he can’t call a lid on foreign affairs; and it’s unclear what he can do to alter the state of the race when both candidates are universally known and defined. Maybe the American people have just decided that, to quote a certain former reality show host, “You’re fired!”