If past elections are any indication, former President Donald Trump will outperform his polling numbers, and if that is the case, he could be headed toward a landslide victory in the Electoral College.
On Election Day in 2016, Trump was considered a slight favorite to win the state of Iowa. But a week before the election, the Des Moines Register published what was essentially an outlier poll showing Trump winning the state by 7 percentage points against then-Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. The two other polls that were released that week showed Trump winning by 3 points and Clinton winning by 1. On election night, Trump won Iowa by 9 points, a shocking result for a state that had backed former President Barack Obama twice.
No other pollster besides the Des Moines Register recorded such a significant lead for Trump in the month prior to the election. Without fail, every poll had the state as a toss-up that slightly favored Trump.
Four years later, a similar story unfolded. On Election Day, the RealClearPolitics average of polls showed Trump with a slight 2-point lead. Polling released in the days before the election all showed the same thing: a dead heat that put the state squarely in play. But not the Des Moines Register poll. Again the outlier, that poll showed Trump leading the state by 7 points again. And when all the votes were counted, Trump won the Hawkeye State by 8 points.
In both cases, this single poll captured what few other pollsters did: Trump’s support was significantly understated by conventional pollsters and he was running far more competitively in the Midwest states in and around the Great Lakes. In 2016, he outperformed his polling in Wisconsin by 7 points, 4 points in Michigan, and by 3 points in Pennsylvania. He won all three states and the presidency.
In 2020, it was the same story, even though he lost all three states: a 7-point overperformance in Wisconsin and a 2-point overperformance in Michigan. The RCP average nailed the 1.2-point margin in Pennsylvania that year.
That brings us to 2024. This week, the Des Moines Register released a poll of the presidential race in Iowa, and the results were astounding. Far from the 7-point lead that the poll recorded in 2016 and 2020, Trump is now leading President Joe Biden in Iowa by a whopping 18 points with third-party candidates included.
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Elsewhere, polling is showing Trump in a dead-heat with Biden in Minnesota and Virginia, two states that have not voted for a Republican candidate in decades. In the perennial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump is enjoying a slight lead over Biden.
But if Minnesota and Virginia are in fact as close as recent polling indicates while Iowa is as uncompetitive as the new poll says, recent history suggests Trump may end up winning the Rust Belt states by far more than current polling suggests. And in doing so, he will dash any hope Biden has of winning reelection.