Mixed poll results for Trump

The latest round of polling contains good news and bad news for both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump less than a week before their first debate showdown.

Biden enjoyed his first lead in a national Fox News poll since October. It is also his largest, with the president beating Trump by 2 points, 50% to 48% in a two-way race. That drops to 1 point when third-party candidates are included, with Biden receiving 43% to Trump’s 42%.

Trump still leads by 0.5 points in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, though Biden has inched ahead by 0.1 points in FiveThirtyEight’s average thanks to five straight national polls putting the Democrat on top (all by 1 to 2 points).

But swing-state polling for the Hill and Emerson College paints a different picture. Trump leads in six battleground states and is tied in the seventh in a two-way race. This improves to all seven when three third-party candidates, including independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are counted.

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The seventh of these states is Minnesota, not considered a swing state at all at the outset of the 2024 campaign. Minnesota is the only state to have never voted for Ronald Reagan. The last Republican presidential nominee to carry it was Richard Nixon in 1972, the same year Biden was first elected to the Senate more than a half-century ago.

There is also the Ipsos swing-state survey, measuring the candidates’ cumulative support in ​​Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. It has Trump up by 2 points in a five-way race and hitting 50% for a 3-point lead when matched up against Biden only. The RealClearPolitics has Trump up in all seven states individually, though often by small margins.

Different polls, sampling different electorates, with different results. But they all show a close race, even after Trump’s conviction in the New York hush money trial.

Nevertheless, there are things each candidate has to like about the latest numbers.

Independents moving toward Biden

In the Fox poll, independents now favor the incumbent by 9 points. In May, they preferred Trump by 2. These unaffiliated voters give Biden higher marks than Trump for integrity. Trump is viewed as the stronger leader but by a smaller margin.

This is consistent with other findings suggesting that there has been a modest drop-off for Trump since his criminal conviction, though that has been partially offset by increased intensity among Republicans who believe he was railroaded. More troubling for Trump is that Fox found confidence in the economy at a record high under Biden. Still, just 32% of respondents felt that way.

Third parties falling back down to earth

One of the differences between 2016, when Trump won, and 2020, when he lost to Biden, was a drop in the third-party vote over that four-year period. Candidates such as Jill Stein and Cornel West are more likely to draw from Biden than Trump, although Kennedy’s effect is less predictable. Trump has made a play for Libertarian Party voters, whose presidential tickets have cleared 1 million votes in each of the last three cycles, often running former Republicans.

In general, a high third-party vote is believed to benefit Trump by making it easier for him to win with a plurality and splitting any potential anti-Trump coalition. Ballot access could go a long way toward determining how big of an impact third parties have this year.

It’s the Electoral College, stupid

If Trump is still ahead in the battleground states, he is still at the moment favored to win the presidency again even if he has fallen slightly behind Biden nationally. That’s because the electoral vote is what elects the president in a composite of 50 state elections rather than a plurality of the national popular vote. This is what happened when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

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That’s not to say that Trump wouldn’t like to be only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988 or that it wouldn’t help him counter Democratic attacks on his legitimacy if reelected. But the six to eight battleground states are where this election will be won or lost.

There are several major future events in the campaign that could still swing the relatively small margins between Trump and Biden. The former president remains competitive after his conviction, with his sentencing to come between the first debate and the Republican National Convention.