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Early polling for the 2024 presidential election reveals Donald Trump dominating the GOP field with no contender in sight, while President Joe Biden is performing evenly against him. Yet with so much of Trump’s near-term future now in question, critics have wondered how helpful or relevant this polling data can be.
Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman argues that while these numbers certainly suggest concrete trends, it’s too early to make conclusions. He notes that voters “don’t start paying attention” until after Labor Day and that up to 15% of independent and swing voters remain undecided. Lastly, if Trump is absent from all debates, could that actually help the Republican Party?
So then I said, “Okay, well, [political forecaster] Rachel [Bitecofer], what about the general election polling that says Trump and Biden are even or whatever?”
And one of the things Rachel pointed out is: a lot of those polls are like 45 to 43, or 43 to 44. When you add that up, you find that it adds up to somewhere between 85 and 90%.
Where is that other 10 to 15% of the electorate? And if you look at the methodology of the polls and the results, you find that there is between 10 and 15% of the electorate who says “I don’t know yet who I’m going to support”. We know that Joe Biden is going to win the state of New York and California. We know that Donald Trump or DeSantis, or whoever is the Republican nominee, is going to win North and South Dakota and Arkansas.
And so we know that the election actually is going to come down to a few states. It’s going to come down to Pennsylvania, and Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin. It’s going to come down to the swing states. And at this point in time, if 10 to 15% of the electorate just has not yet made up their mind, then we really can’t say very much at all about Biden is likely to win or lose against this, that or the other candidate.
