The last few installments of this series have been rather gloomy for President Biden. Two weeks ago, we questioned whether the presidential race should still be fairly characterized as a toss-up. Last week we noted that one of the key events in the 2024 election – Donald Trump’s conviction for document falsification in New York – seemed to be having little impact on the race. This week, I promised good news for Joe Biden, and I will deliver.
First, we should observe that some of the suggestions that Trump’s trial was a non-event might have been a touch premature. Trump’s lead in the 2024 General Election: Trump vs. Biden Polls | RealClearPolling has fallen to a half point, and a number of pollsters who had previously shown Trump ahead now show Biden in the lead. This appears to be caused by Trump’s numbers falling – in other words, voters shifting to the undecided category rather than favoring Biden – but it is notable.
We’ve also had a series of mediocre state polls for Trump. Marist, which actually had a bit of a pro-Republican bias in 2022 according to RealClearPolitics - Multiple State - RCP Pollster Scorecard, shows Trump up seven points in Ohio, mirroring his 2020 showing. Minnesota is a four-point race, which is an improvement from 2020, but not by much. So the New York trial and verdict may have blunted what seemed to be genuine momentum for Trump.
These last few polling numbers reveal another bit of good news for Biden that has received little notice. The Republican Party’s Electoral College edge seems to be receding. Trump’s improved polling seems to be at least somewhat a function of his much remarked-upon gains with black and Hispanic voters. Whether Trump can retain these gains through November is another thing altogether, but these inroads have probably helped Trump gain a national lead in the popular vote. They’ve also provided a boost in important states with large non-white populations, like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. My guess is we’ll see a similar effect in places like California, New York, and New Mexico once we get polling from them. This mirrors what we saw in the 2022 midterms, where the Republicans’ popular vote edge in state legislatures improved across all of these states.
The gains in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada are consequential. They only get Trump to 268 electoral votes. Assuming the GOP holds a majority of the congressional delegations after the elections (which would ensure Trump wins the presidency in the event of a tie), he needs one more.
This is where things get tricky for him. If we look at the 2020 election results, after Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, the closest Biden-won states were Wisconsin (0.63%), Pennsylvania (1.18%), and Michigan (2.78%). There’s a big jump from there to Minnesota (7.11%), New Hampshire (7.35%), Maine (9.07%), Virginia (10.11%), and New Mexico (10.79%).
The polling in the first three states has remained close. Trump leads by all three in our averages –0.1% in Wisconsin, 0.3% in Michigan, and 2.3% in Pennsylvania. Those states also showed fairly flat popular vote swings from 2020 to 2022 in both GOP congressional delegation votes and GOP state legislative votes. In a time of flux, they’ve been stubbornly stable.
One doesn’t have to be gifted with a particularly vigorous imagination to see what could happen here: Trump has substantial improvements among non-white voters, driving gains in some red areas (like Texas) and flipping some important swing states. He also makes gains in some blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, California, and New York, but is unable to flip them because the hole with educated whites is just too deep. Then, in relatively white Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan, very little changes.
The result could easily be Trump winning the popular vote, but Biden eking out a narrow 270-268 Electoral Vote victory (assuming that NE-02 holds for him). It’s a really narrow road to victory for the former president right now, but it is also a perfectly plausible path. It wouldn’t take much of a shift in voting patterns (for example, one that mirrored what we see right now in the popular vote) for it to become extremely likely. That might not be much good news for the embattled incumbent, but it’s currently a very underrated possibility.
