Donald Trump now has a three point problem
It’s still way too early for 2024 general election polls to mean much, especially considering that they’re all over the place. Each week there are a few new polls showing Joe Biden winning by various margins, and a few new polls showing Donald Trump winning by various margins. The media often likes to highlight just the Trump-leaning polls in order to hype doom and gloom, but in reality, the on average polls suggest that a Biden-Trump 2024 matchup might be tied. Take that for what little it’s worth in January of 2024. But there is a story here.
If you’re trying to see how accurate the polls ended up being, you compare the final polling averages to the actual result. To that end, Trump ended up finishing about three points worse than expected in this month’s Iowa caucus, and again finished about three points worse than expected in this week’s New Hampshire primary.
It would be a bit too early to call this a pattern, except that Trump has history of finishing worse than the final polling averages said he would, dating back to 2020. So this means that if you are going to look at the 2024 general election polls that have Trump and Biden tied on average, you’d probably have to presume that Trump is once again going to perform worse than his polls. If we were to apply that same three point margin that Trump keeps underperforming by, it would mean Biden would win by three points.
Three points is not a lot. It’s not enough to feel comfortable. And again, it’s far too early for the general election polls to mean much anyway. But it certainly doesn’t point to Joe Biden being in trouble. The polls suggest that Biden is tied at worst, and if Trump’s history of underperforming holds true, then Biden is slightly ahead.
We have our work cut out for us. Presidential general elections almost always end up being fairly close. You know the drill. Each side automatically gets about 45% of the vote, and the result comes down to that remaining 10%. Even the least popular presidential nominee of all time would probably get 40% just by showing up. Throw in the Electoral College, and it’s obvious why you want to try to put in as much work as possible to expand your margin just in case. But Biden isn’t in “trouble” by any stretch of the imagination. If anything it’s Trump, who keeps underperforming his polls, who has something to worry about mathematically.
