Oh look, another high quality poll is out today:
The crosstabs for this poll are a little hard to make sense of, but they seem to show that Joe Biden has 80% support among Black voters and 63% support among Hispanic voters. Among independents, he trails Trump 46%-54%. These seem relatively reasonable, which provides reason to think the poll is fairly accurate.
10% of voters were undecided. When they were pushed to say who they leaned toward, Biden came out ahead of Trump 51%-49%.
Once again, this is a poll of registered voters. Later in the campaign pollsters will start including their likely voter screens, which will help provide somewhat more accurate numbers.
Also, a standard caveat: this is a national poll. It says nothing about how Biden and Trump are doing in specific states.
8 months to go.
For all we know, Biden'll have a heart attack and/or Trump's dementia will get too severe by November to ignore and it'll be a whole new game.
“ this is a national poll. It says nothing about how Biden and Trump are doing in specific states.”
So, it’s meaningless. Meanwhile we have polls of Georgia that show Biden way behind.
Don't forget that in polls Biden needs to lead by 3 percentage points or more to beat Trump. This is needed because the structure of the electoral college system favors Republicans. (This is why nowadays Republicans love the electoral college. It's a sacred institution from the Constitution, and so on.)
Clinton beat Trump by 2.1 percentage points in the popular vote, but still lost. Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 percentage points.
It’s not clear the Electoral College will work in this manner this cycle. There is no law of physics requiring the Electoral College advantage to always accrue to the benefit of the GOP instead of Democrats.
It says a lot about America, mostly bad, that Trump can get nearly 50% of the vote. This after attempting to violently overthrow our last presidential election; his choices for the Supreme Court; his support of an abortion ban and more; his unsubtle racism; his lack of support for our allies (NATO); his open support of Putin; and his unending lies.
Our judicial system is failing, our legislative branch is hamstrung and for sale to the highest bidder. And the best we can do for presidential candidates is a 78 year old near psychopath and a benign 81 year old who doesn’t know when to stop. The fact that it is so close does not bode well for America in the future.
One of the features (bugs?) of the U.S. system is the possibility of divided government; parliamentary systems avoid this, sometimes at the cost of less stability. I’m not a campaign professional, but 2024 seems like a good year to coordinate Presidential and down-ballot campaigns. Republicans have demonstrated their incompetence at running the House. States run by Republicans have screwed their citizens out of Medicaid expansion and are now taking rights away from women and votes away from those who have ‘paid their debt to society’. Their candidate for the Presidency tried to take away the protections of the ACA, and appointed the Justices that ended women’s right to choose. He ordered his Congress-chickens to tank the border+aid bill so he can keep whining about the border, never mind the harm to the country and our allies. Democrats need to beat them 24/7, up and down, and then remind voters incessantly of manufacturing jobs returning, infrastructure projects getting underway, climate mitigation initiatives, student loan relief, drug price reductions.