A growing number of national polls show a very tight 2024 presidential election between President Joe Biden and his presumptive rival, former President Donald Trump, while several of them actually have Trump leading Biden, especially in key battleground states.
“Biden’s campaign has emphasized that the election is still more than a year away and that the president is putting in the work to mobilize voters to rally around his reelection bid,” The Hill reports.
“Still, the combination of the close polling with Biden’s low approval ratings has some political observers cautious about Biden’s chances for 2024,” the report added.
Earlier this month, Dave Wasserman of the non-partisan Cook Political Report posted on the X platform that he believed that Biden would actually lose the election to an indicted Trump if it were held today. He pointed out that Biden’s favorability rating is slightly positive while Trump’s was 41 percent in 2020, though Trump was only short about 42,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin from being victorious.
“Now fast forward to 2024 with tied national polls, 40% Biden approval, equally dismal Biden/Trump favorability, more economic pessimism, growing migrant/[international] crises and the potential for [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]/[Cornel West] to double Jill Stein’s pull on campuses, etc,” Wasserman said. “Biden is in absolutely dire shape. This is a five-alarm fire.”
Concern has been rising over Biden’s 2024 prospects following a string of polls showing a very tight race against Trump or the president actually falling behind his 2020 opponent.
The Hill added:
The former president led Biden by 2 points in a national Emerson College poll released Friday and by 4 points in a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll from Thursday of seven key swing states that will most likely decide the outcome of the 2024 race, including Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Another Emerson poll out of Pennsylvania, released earlier this month, found Trump with a 9 point lead over the president.
The Hill noted that, at this point in their respective presidencies, Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Barack Obama were polling similarly to Biden, and both comfortably won reelection.
“Polls this far out are a distraction. This same time before the ’12 election, pollsters were crawling over each other to call it for the GOP. BTW, Obama won,” Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, posted on X last week.
The race could also come down to demographics.
For instance, the number of Hispanic American voters has increased by nearly 5 million since the 2018 midterm elections, and they have increasingly trended to the right, potentially benefiting Republican candidates from Trump on down the ballot.
A recent analysis conducted by the left-leaning Pew Research Center, Hispanic voters increased by 4.7 million over the past five years. “While Democrats still outpace Republicans in terms of voter registration, a higher number of Latinos voted Republican in the 2022 midterm elections than they did in 2018,” ADN America reported, citing Pew’s data.
The analysis also noted that Hispanics are trending red.
“While Hispanic voters continued to favor Democrats over Republicans, a higher share of Hispanic voters supported GOP candidates in the 2022 election compared with 2018,” it said. “In November, 60% of Hispanic voters cast ballots for Democrats, compared with 39% who supported Republicans. This 21-point margin is smaller than in 2018, when 72% of Hispanic voters favored Democrats and 25% supported Republicans.”
Previously, ADN America reported that Hispanic Americans have now surpassed the non-Hispanic white majority in Texas, adding that 1 million Hispanics reach the voting age of 18 every year now:
Last year, Hispanics made up 40.2% of the Texas population while non-Hispanic White Texans made up 39.4%, according to estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS) for 2021.
“One million young Hispanic Americans are expected to turn 18 every year for the next 15 years, according to an October 2022 Pew Research Center study, making Hispanic American youth a key target demographic for both parties as a million new eligible voters will be borne from the group each year for the next decade and a half,” ADN reported separately.
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