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The Polls Are Showing Trump Can Maybe Beat Biden After All

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  June 28, 2023 8:30 PM

We're still a year away from next summer's nominating conventions, and almost a year and a half away from the general election. The Iowa Caucus isn't going to take place until sometime in January. Yet the polls are already preparing for the 2024 presidential general election to be a rematch of 2020 where President Joe Biden faces former and potentially future President Donald Trump, who would be both his predecessor and successor, if he were to go up against and beat Biden in 2024. In this already primary season, there has already been some concerns about whether or not Trump is the best candidate to beat Biden, or if he can beat him at all. 

RealClearPolitics (RCP) currently shows Trump with a +0.6 lead over Biden, while Biden actually has a +1.0 lead over DeSantis, though this is just one metric when it comes to who is the Republican Party's best hope.

The RCP average also doesn't appear to show a recently released poll from Morning Consult released on Tuesday. What's even more significant is that this poll shows Trump ahead of Biden for the first time since Morning Consult has been tracking this hypothetical match up, going back to December, as the poll highlighted with his 3 percentage point lead being outside the margin of error.

Trump has 44 percent support compared to Biden's 41 percent support. Biden, meanwhile, has a lead over DeSantis, with   42 percent support to DeSantis' 40 percent support.

The poll was conducted June 23-25, with 6,000 registered voter and a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point. 

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The Trump campaign was all too happy to highlight results from the poll with a Tuesday press release declaring "Morning Consult Poll: President Trump Dominating GOP Primary, Only Republican To Beat Biden." Trump also highlighted the results of the poll on TruthSocial. 

That would be significant enough if it were the only poll, which it's not. Another national poll, from Economist/YouGov, also shows Trump ahead of Biden, this time by 4 points. That poll was included in the RCP average. 

The poll shows Trump with 44 percent support among registered voters compared to Biden's 40 percent support. But again, there's more to this poll other than it's significant that Trump is leading Biden. As InteractivePolls highlighted on Twitter, Trump had been losing to Biden less than a month ago, with a 43-40 breakdown in support of Biden.

When we break down the demographics by political party of who supports Trump in a matchup against Biden, he has the support of 82 percent of Republicans and holds onto the 93 percent of voters who supported him in 2020. He also has the support of 4 percent of Biden voters from 2020. 

Biden, meanwhile has the support of 78 percent of Democrats and holds onto 83 percent of his voters from 2020. Just 1 percent of Trump voters from 2020 say they would vote for him. 

Trump also leads by double digits among Independents, with 38 percent to Biden's 28 percent support. Independents have been critical of Biden, even with their slight increase in approval for the president lately. It's also worth noting that Trump won in 2016 with the help from Independents, as did Biden in 2020.

While the poll does show that 41 percent of registered voters believe Biden will win, that 40 percent believe Trump will win puts these numbers at a statistical tie. There's still plenty of room for these candidates to convince the American people that they can, and will, win. 

The Economist/YouGov poll was conducted June 24-27 with 1,500 adults, which included 1,315 registered voters. Among those registered voters, the margin of error was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. 

We can also add in how two polls were just released earlier on Wednesday for the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with a "Meet the Press" blog post for NBC News highlighting "Two battleground polls paint very different pictures of the 2024 election." Trump won both states in 2016 and thus the presidency, while Biden did in 2020, and thus the presidency. These states will be ones to watch, for sure.

Quinnipiac conducted their poll on Pennsylvania voters, where Trump and Biden are virtually tied, with Trump at 47 percent and Biden at 46 percent. The poll's write-up calls that matchup "a virtual dead heat." Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy is also quoted as saying that "Though battling fierce legal headwinds, Trump leaves the rest of the GOP pack (including Ron DeSantis) looking like 'also rans' and is running neck and neck with President Biden."

That poll was conducted June 22-26 with 1,584 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. 

The poll of Wisconsin voters comes from Marquette University Law School, which has a bit of a different take. It shows Biden leading both DeSantis and Trump, though by far narrower margins against DeSantis, with 49 percent support to DeSantis' 47 percent in that hypothetical matchup. Against Trump, Biden has 52 percent support compared to Trump's 43 percent. 

It was conducted June 8-13 with 913 registered voters and a total margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points. 

The blog post mentioned above raised some questions about the differing results, making the perfectly apt point that there's still time:

Can both of those polls be right? Is Biden really ahead in Wisconsin (a state he won by about 0.6 percentage points in 2020), but tied in Pennsylvania (which he won nearly twice that margin)? And is DeSantis really running neck-and-neck with Trump in one of the states despite trailing badly in national polls of the GOP primary? 

When it comes to a general election that’s still more than a year away, our recent national NBC News showed a hypothetical Biden-versus-Trump race right in between the Marquette and Quinnipiac results: Biden 49%, Trump 45%.

These polls come after previous polling analysis from earlier in the week, as highlighted by Guy, shows Biden leading Trump in swing states, while DeSantis leads Biden. Guy made a particularly telling point, though, in that "it's all hypothetical and meaningless if DeSantis can't get himself into a general election setting."

As we covered on Tuesday night, Biden's approval ratings, though they are at their highest in several months, are still rather low. The country being on the wrong track is another major factor. Of course, there's still plenty of time for these polls to change in every which direction. We might not even see a Trump-Biden match up. Time will tell.