Donald Trump is on the verge of entering 2024 arguably holding a status that is unprecedented for him: Election frontrunner.
It’s an unfamiliar position for a candidate now suddenly leading most 2024 general-election polls in a way he never did in races past.
This is despite his supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol, and despite the 91 criminal charges against him, dismay at his pro-authoritarianism and anti-immigrant rhetoric and efforts in some states to remove his name from the ballot.
A Democratic strategist and former aide to Barack Obama lamented the state of affairs with less than a year to go before the November 2024 election.
“Very, very dark,” David Axelrod said on his podcast, as he ticked through recent poll findings showing U.S. President Joe Biden behind.
“It’s bad.”
Several professional elections analysts are hesitant to anoint Trump with the F-word — frontrunner — this early in the race.
One year ahead of the next U.S. election, U.S. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump appear headed for a rematch, with polls showing Trump has an edge despite his legal woes.
What the early polls mean
“Yeah, he has the lead,” said Drew McCoy, president of election-data company Decision Desk HQ, in an interview with CBC News.
“Right now we see it as a tossup, with a slight advantage to Trump.”
A majority of recent surveys show Trump ahead both nationally and in swing states, but there are exceptions.
“For us, it’s tied,” said Tim Mallow, an analyst at the Quinnipiac University Poll, which this week found Biden and Trump, the likely general-election opponents, even at 47 per cent apiece.
“It’s a nailbiter, now.”
The Canadian-born director of data sciences at the University of Pennsylvania’s public-opinion research program holds a similar view: “It’s hard to call this anything other than a pure tossup,” said Marc Trussler.
If this election were in any other country, Canadians might be more inclined to wait a few months before paying attention.
But given the potential for Trump’s policies to shape everything from our trade to our military alliances, this race holds special interest.
So how substantive is this early lead?
Trump is ahead in most national surveys over the last two months, usually by a few points. But there’s more. He’s been leading swing-state surveys, by different pollsters, in the places that will decide the election.
He’s performing about seven percentage points better against Biden, than at this time four years ago in the average of polls on the site RealClearPolitics.
Trump came within a hair of winning the electoral college in 2020, and he’s now polling about 10 points better against Biden than he was on the last election day.
Candidate strategies
Both leading candidates are unpopular, and their success may very well hinge on getting voters to focus on the other guy.
Trump will try, says McCoy, to make this election a referendum on the Biden presidency — on disenchantment with inflation, and foreign-affairs crises.
Biden, meanwhile, will try to get voters to focus on the implications, including for American democracy, of restoring Trump to power.
WATCH | Focus of Biden ad is to draw contrasts with Trump:
Readers might wonder how valuable public-opinion polls are almost a year before election day?
If history is any guide, they can be moderately prophetic. In 2012, 2016 and 2020, polls a year out correctly identified the eventual popular vote winner. On the other hand, the polls continued to fluctuate, and they missed the eventual Obama surge in 2008.
All of which is a reminder that it’s hard to predict which issues that will be driving the conversation in a year.
At this point in past cycles pundits were not predicting the financial meltdown of 2008, the pandemic-election of 2020, and the hacks and email leaks of 2016.
“There’s a lot of golf to play,” Malloy said.
Elections start after holidays
The election officially starts after the holidays. The first presidential primary contests are in January, with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15 and the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23.
“This is really where it begins,” McCoy said. “It’s trite, it’s corny, but, you know, campaigns matter.”
It’s hard to imagine Trump’s coronation as the Republican nominee being derailed, but if it’s going to happen, it’s likeliest to happen in New Hampshire, an early open primary state where non-Republicans can vote.
Then there’s the cloud looming over the general election forecast: Is there a chance of Trump being tried, and convicted, during the campaign?
Former U.S. president Donald Trump has repeated campaign rhetoric that undocumented immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the United States. The White House has condemned the comments and some are drawing comparisons to language used in Nazi Germany.
His trial schedule now rests, in part, with the Supreme Court, which is hearing challenges to the earliest case that’s scheduled to begin in March.
While criminal accusations haven’t hurt Trump, a chunk of his supporters have told pollsters they’d change their vote if he were actually found guilty.
“That’s a whole new ballgame,” Malloy said.
The Supreme Court is also expected to consider an effort to strike Trump’s name off the ballot in Colorado over his connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, a gambit that has failed in other states.
In the meantime, some urge caution in over-relying on polls.
Even avid consumers of political news might not fully appreciate the extent to which modern pollsters struggle to build surveys that reflect the electorate in ways past pollsters did not.
How reliable are the polls?
It’s getting harder to predict who will vote and a just-released New York Times poll illustrates how that affects survey results.
It published two distinct sets of data: one showing Trump two points ahead of Biden among all registered voters, another showing Trump two points behind when counting only those respondents deemed likeliest to vote.
“The most important thing about election polls this far out is that they are all making total guesses about the size and composition of the electorate,” Trussler said.
The polls we’re seeing are also built on underlying data that have some election-watchers scratching their heads.
Take, for example, recent surveys by Fox News and the New York Times that show Trump ahead. They include a staggering finding — that Trump is leading, by up to 13 points, among the youngest voters who responded.
Similarly, skeptics scoff at a reported surge in support for Trump among African-American poll respondents — triple or quadruple the eight per cent Trump got last time.
“That, to me, is crazy,” said Miles Coleman, an analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Trump isn’t going to get that.”
His team still has Biden pegged as the slight favourite next year. That’s based in part on the expectation that he’ll regain some voters he’s lost, including younger people turned off by Biden’s support for Israel.
When the election is underway, and it’s Biden versus Trump, Coleman said: “My assumption is some of those probably come back.”
The Democrats won big in off-year U.S. elections where the national debate on abortion was front and centre. A researcher who studies American attitudes toward abortion says this is again another sign the U.S. is a pro-choice country.
A clash of turnout titans: Roe v. Trump
But the truth is we’re in uncharted territory.
This election will test two new realities: Trump against a powerful force that has just as much of a reputation for turning out voters — the new abortion politics.
Democrats have consistently out-performed expectations in elections and referendums, with their voters motivated to turn out since the Supreme Court reduced abortion access.
We’ll see how that fares against Trump, who twice shattered right-wing turnout records, outperforming polls that failed to fully measure his support.
Trussler says this election could boil down to whether the electorate looks more like the recent Ohio abortion referendum (heavy on college-educated voters, more Democratic-leaning) or the electorates of 2016 and 2020 (more working class, more Republican).
“I don’t know which world we are going to be in, but neither do any of these pollsters,” Trussler said.
Is panic starting to set in among Democrats? On his podcast, Axelrod said he still believes Biden is likelier to win than lose.
But one political commentator said he risks facing a mutiny if there are no signs of a shift in momentum early in the new year.
E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist and Georgetown University professor, said at a recent event for the Brookings Institution think-tank that better polling numbers might put an end to the talk about Democrats needing an alternative to Biden.
“If his numbers stay where they are now, I think that talk will continue. I still don’t see [another candidate] jumping in, but at a certain point, you wonder if something cracks.”