Not Only Can Trump Win, Right Now He’s the Favorite To Win | RealClearPolitics
There s a strange disjunction in the discourse about the 2024 elections. On the one hand, when presented with the proposition Trump can win, people will nod their heads sagely and say something along the lines of: Of course he can; only a fool would believe to the contrary.
At the same time, whenever polling emerges showing that Donald Trump is performing well in 2024 matchups, a deluge of panicked articles, tweets (or is it X s?), social media posts, and the like emerge, reassuring readers that polls aren t predictive and providing a variety of reasons that things will improve for President Biden.
As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Elections analysts seem to know that they are obliged to mouth the words that Trump can win, but deep down, they don t believe them. The notion that Biden is the favorite is deeply internalized, likely for a variety of reasons.
So let us set the record straight: Trump can win. Not in a maybe if all the stars align and then Russia changes the vote totals (even somehow in states like Michigan that use hand-marked paper ballots) kind of way. Just flat out: Trump can win.
As of this writing, Trump leads Biden by 2.6 percentage points nationally in the RealClearPolitics Average. This is Trump s largest lead in the RCP average to date. Not for 2024, mind you. Ever.
Let s put this in perspective. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton for all of five days in the national RCP Average, each of those days in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention. He led in 29 polls taken over the course of the entire campaign, 10 of which are recorded in the RCP averages as Los Angeles Times/USC tracking polls.
In 2020, Trump never led Biden in the national RCP Average. He briefly closed to within four points in early January of 2020, but that is it. He led in five polls all cycle.
So, counting the L.A. Times tracker as a single poll, Trump led in a total of 24 national polls. This cycle? He s led in that many since mid-September. He s led in more polls in the past three weeks than he did against Biden in all of 2019-2020.
Sean Trende. I find Sean pretty reliable.