With the GOP primary now all but over, with Trump the likely winner of the nomination, we are going to see more battleground state polling and national polling, including polls with third-party candidates, as RFK Jr. will likely be on the ballot in the majority of states.
The new Quinnipiac University survey was released on Wednesday, and surprise, that big lead that Trump had in prior polls is gone, with the margin a bit tighter in a 3-way race.
Talking Points…
- Battleground state polling
- New 2024 general election polling
- Analysis
Generally speaking, the presidential election is won or lost in Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Of those states, we will assume that Florida will be red in 2024, leaving us with seven states that should decide the outcome of this election.
Trump led in every one of those states, with his biggest lead being in North Carolina, with a 10-point lead over Biden, and single digits in all the other states. However, there is cause for concern in these states. As I have been saying all along if Trump is convicted in any federal case, his support plummets.
In all battleground states, 53% said they would not vote for Trump if convicted, with 55% saying they would not vote for him if he were sentenced to jail. That is why Trump continues to push to have these federal cases delayed until after the election.
Trump has dominated polling through the primary election, but that just changed. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows Biden ahead by six points in a head-to-head matchup, which shrinks just a bit if there is a third-party candidate, and there will be, with RFK Jr. already on the ballot in many states and fighting to have his name put on the ballot in the remaining states.
In terms of party support, Biden is 96-2 among Democrats, Trump is 91-7 among Republicans, and Biden leads independent voters with a 52-40 edge over Trump. Troublesome for Trump is that the gender gap is now going the other way, with Biden now winning the women’s vote, 58-36. The switch in this particular demographic is what is believed to be behind the surge for Biden.
In virtually every poll that closed through January 25, Trump was leading. In the polls that started to close after that date, we started to see mixed results, now a steady trend of Biden leading in the polling. For example, in the latest YouGov/Economist poll, Biden is now ahead 43-42. Biden and Trump are tied in the latest CIVIQS/Daily KOS poll.
I won’t be the guy that says I told you so, at least not yet, but this is a problem for Trump. If we look at this situation honestly, Trump is at his highest appeal, and Biden is at his lowest right now. Biden has barely campaigned, and Democrats, by and large, have not attacked Trump on anything, allowing the primary race to pan out first, so I fully expect Biden to get some bump in the polling.
Trump, on the other hand, is on the flip side of this. His surrogates have alienated Ron DeSantis supporters, and now they are on an all-out assault against Taylor Swift with rumors of Biden wooing her for an endorsement, and the worst of Trump’s legal problems still lies ahead. As I noted above, his support will be impacted by these cases if a guilty verdict is handed down.
I am saying all this because Trump supporters cannot get comfortable based on all the polling that Trump has been leaning into so far. We still have 10 full months before the election, and the attacks are now going to start. My biggest concern, however, is the fact that Trump’s surrogates are alienating voters instead of drawing them in.
Alex Bruesewitz, Trump’s main guy on Twitter, told DeSantis supporters they were not needed to win a general election. He has mocked them, trolled them, spread false rumors, etc. I have seen another surrogate on Twitter say that if Taylor Swift endorses Joe Biden, she will “pay.” This does not even account for the big names like Judge Jeanine Pirro and Charlie Kirk. And let’s not forget the narrative Jesse Watters and Vivek Ramaswamy pushed that Swift is involved in some massive psyop on behalf of the Pentagon.
This is doing three things… first, it is energizing MAGA, who love these attacks. Second, it is repelling young voters away from Trump, which is idiotic because this is an area where Biden is bleeding voters, but the attacks against Swift will kill any momentum Trump has on that front. Third, without DeSantis voters, Trump loses, plain and simple, as Republicans don’t have that many votes to spare in a national race.
I am being brutally honest here. Trump needs to decide if he wants to have a campaign that will be entertaining for his hard-core supporters or if he wants a campaign that will win him an election. Right now, it is the former, and he should be firing everyone involved in his campaign for that very reason. If Trump really wants to win this election, they need to start working right now to win voters back and ignore the Taylor Swift nonsense. Simply put, stop alienating people.
