Donald Trump is about to enter 2024 with arguably an unprecedented status for him: that of election favorite.
This is an unusual position for a candidate who is now suddenly leading most polls for the 2024 general election, as he never did in previous elections.
This despite the attack on the Capitol by his supporters and despite the 91 criminal charges brought against him, the dismay at his pro-authoritarianism and anti-immigration the rhetoric and efforts of certain States to remove your name from the ballot.
A Democratic strategist and former collaborator of Barack Obama deplored the situation less than a year before the November 2024 elections.
“Very, very gloomy,” David Axelrod said on his podcast, scanning the results of a recent poll showing US President Joe Biden trailing.
“It’s bad.”
Many professional election analysts are hesitant to give Trump the F-word — favorite — this early in the race.
With the next US election a year away, US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appear headed for a rematch, with polls showing Trump has the advantage despite his legal woes.
What the first polls mean
“Yeah, he’s calling the shots,” Drew McCoy, president of election data company Decision Desk HQ, said in an interview with CBC News.
“For now, we view this as a toss-up, with a slight edge in favor of Trump.”
The majority of recent surveys show Trump ahead both nationally and in key states, but there are exceptions.
“For us, it’s a tie,” said Quinnipiac University poll analyst Tim Mallow, who this week found Biden and Trump, the likely general election opponents, even at 47% each.
“It’s a real headache now.”
The Canadian Director of Data Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania public opinion research program He shares a similar view: “It’s hard to call it anything other than just a kickoff,” Marc Trussler said.
If this election were held in another country, Canadians might be more inclined to wait a few months before paying attention.
But given the potential of Trump’s politics to shape everything from our trade to our military alliances, this race is of particular interest.
So, what is the relevance of this first lead?
Trump is ahead in most areas national surveys over the past couple of months, usually by a few points. But there is more. He led swing state surveysby different soundersin the places which will decide the election.
He plays approximately seven percentage points better against Biden, that at the moment Four years ago in the average of surveys on the RealClearPolitics site.
Trump nearly won the Electoral College in 2020, and he is now about 10 points better off Biden than he was on the last day of the election.
Candidate Strategies
Both major candidates are unpopular, and their success may well hinge on getting voters to focus on the other.
Trump will try, McCoy says, to make this election a referendum on Biden’s presidency — on disenchantment with inflation and foreign affairs crises.
Biden, meanwhile, will try to get voters to focus on the implications, particularly for American democracy, of Trump’s return to power.
WATCH | The goal of Biden’s ad is to draw contrasts with Trump:
Readers might ask, what is the value of public opinion polls nearly a year before Election Day?
If history can be a guide, it can be moderately prophetic. In 2012, 2016 And 2020, the year-old polls correctly identified the eventual winner of the popular vote. On the other hand, the polls continued to fluctuate, and they missed Obama’s eventual surge. In 2008.
All of this reminds us that it is difficult to predict which issues will be at the heart of discussions a year from now.
At this point in previous cycles, experts were not predicting the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic elections, or the 2016 hacks and email leaks.
“There’s a lot of golf to be played,” Malloy said.
Elections start after the holidays
The elections officially begin after the holidays. The first presidential primaries will take place in January, with the Iowa caucuses on January 15 and the New Hampshire primaries on January 23.
“That’s really where it all starts,” McCoy said. “It’s trite, it’s corny, but, you know, campaigns matter.”
It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s coronation as the Republican nominee could be derailed, but if it’s going to happen, it’s more likely to happen in New Hampshire, one of the world’s first nations. open primary State where non-Republicans can vote.
Then there’s the cloud hanging over general election predictions: Is there a chance Trump will be tried and convicted during the campaign?
Former US President Donald Trump repeated his campaign rhetoric that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. The White House has condemned the comments and some are drawing comparisons to language used in Nazi Germany.
His trial schedule now rests, in part, with the Supreme Courtwhich is hearing challenges to the first case which is expected to begin in March.
Although the criminal charges haven’t hurt Trump, a portion of his supporters have told pollsters they would change their vote if he were actually convicted.
“It’s a whole new ball game,” Malloy said.
The Supreme Court is also expected to consider attempting to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in Colorado because of his connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, a strategy that has failed in other states.
In the meantime, some are calling for caution and not relying too much on polls.
Even avid consumers of political news may not fully appreciate the extent to which modern pollsters struggle to construct surveys that reflect the electorate. in a way that previous pollsters have not done.
How reliable are surveys?
It’s increasingly difficult to predict who will vote, and a just-released New York Times poll illustrates how that affects survey results.
He released two separate data sets: one showing Trump two points ahead of Biden among all registered voters, another showing Trump two points behind counting only respondents deemed most likely to vote.
“The most important thing about election polls at this scale is that they all make aggregate estimates about the size and composition of the electorate,” Trussler said.
The polls we see also rely on underlying data that has some election observers perplexed.
Take, for example, recent surveys conducted by Fox News and the New York Times which show Trump one step ahead. They include a staggering conclusion – that Trump leads, by as much as 13 points, among the youngest voters who responded.
In the same way, skeptics laugh to a reported increase in support for Trump among African-American poll respondents – tripling or quadrupling the eight percent Trump got it last time.
“To me, it’s crazy,” said Miles Coleman, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Trump won’t understand this.”
His team still considered Biden the slight favorite next year. Part of that rests on the hope that he will regain some voters he lost, including young people turned off by Biden’s support for Israel.
With the election underway, and it’s Biden versus Trump, Coleman said, “I suspect some of them will probably come back.”
Democrats won big in the off-year U.S. election, where the national debate over abortion was at the forefront. A researcher who studies American attitudes toward abortion says this is yet another sign that the United States is a pro-choice country.
A Clash of Turnout Titans: Roe versus Trump
But the truth is that we are in uncharted territory.
This election will test two new realities: Trump against a powerful force that has just as much of a reputation for turning out voters – the new politics of abortion.
Democrats have consistently outperformed expectations in elections and referendums, with their voters motivated to participate since the Supreme Court decision. reduced access to abortion.
We’ll see how that plays out against Trump, who twice broke right-wing turnout records, outperforming polls that failed to fully measure his support.
Trussler says this election could come down to whether the electorate looks more like the recent Ohio abortion referendum (strong on educated voters, more Democratic leaning) or electorates of 2016 and 2020 (more worker, more republican).
“I don’t know what world we’re going to live in, but neither do any of these pollsters,” Trussler said.
Is panic starting to set in among Democrats? On his podcast, Axelrod said he still thinks Biden has a better chance of winning than losing.
But one political commentator said he risked facing a mutiny if there was no sign of a change in dynamics at the start of the new year.
EJ Dionne, a Washington Post columnist and professor at Georgetown University, said at a recent event for the Brookings Institution think tank that better poll numbers could end talk that Democrats would need an alternative to Biden.
“If his numbers stay where they are now, I think the discussions will continue. I still don’t see (another candidate) stepping in, but at some point you wonder if something is cracking.”
