Poll numbers published Friday show former President Donald Trump ahead of incumbent President Joe Biden by double digits — but don’t hang up those victory posters just yet.
The good news for the Trump team is that when Rassmussen asked respondents to choose among three names, Trump got 46 percent of the support of likely voters, Biden picked up 36 percent, and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took 9 percent. Another 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and the other 5 percent or so were undecided.
And yes, by most accounts, Trump has an edge over Biden going into November’s presidential election. But there are a few important details to keep in mind.
First off, this is a Rasmussen poll, which have a history of favoring Republican candidates. In its final 2020 polling, for example, Rasmussen showed Biden winning — but by 1 point, not the 4.5-point margin with which he ended that election. (It also predicted a 1-point generic Republican advantage in the 2018 midterms that Republicans lost by 8.4 points, and predicted a 5-point GOP edge in the 2022 midterms that they won by only 2.8 points.)
Second, Rasmussen doesn’t provide a full explanation of its methodology, making it difficult to evaluate how accurate its polling might be.
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And third — and probably most importantly — the election is still six months out. A lot can happen in six months. Events in Ukraine or the Middle East, on college campuses around the U.S. or in a Manhattan courtroom could all sway these numbers in one way or another, as could many other possible events.
It should also be noted that the poll is certainly an outlier. The RealClearPolling average of polls taken over the past month or so gives Trump a 2.9-point edge over Biden — and here it’s worth noting that six of the polls included in that average show Trump on top, four show a tie and only one gives Biden the edge.
However, it’s also worth nothing that all but two of those 11 polls survey registered — not likely — voters, making them potentially decent barometers of public opinion but not super useful as predictors of November results.
As the Intelligencer recommended in weekend story about presidential polling, “if the question is ‘Who’s ahead?’ and the race is close enough to make precision matter, stick with the averages.”
Will Trump’s lead in the polls continue to grow?
An, of course, these are all national polls — and presidential elections are won state-by-state, not by the national popular vote.
Still, RCP gives Trump a slight edge in Electoral College votes — 219-to-214, with 104 too close to call, or 312-to-226 if it goes ahead and calls the close races (but I’d take that last predicition with a grain of salt — or possibly the whole shaker — if I were you).
Trump also has an aggregate 3.2 percent edge over Biden in the seven swing states RealClearPolling tracks, winning all seven — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
(RCP leaves Minnesota out of its list of swing states, probably because no Republican has carried the state since 1972. Still, Biden has only a 2.3-point lead there according to the most current polls, which may indicate that there are another 10 Electoral College delegates up for grabs.)
The takeaway from all that — the presidential race is almost certainly closer than Rasmussen would indicate, but Trump does certainly seem to have the advantage.
“Overall, it’s reasonably clear that the Biden-Trump race remains very close in terms of the national popular vote with Trump maintaining a small advantage in winning enough battleground states to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory,” the Intelligence wrote Saturday. “That’s also what other metrics like candidate favorability, partisan affiliation, and above all recent history would suggest.”
Even The New York Times agrees with that sentiment, by the way.
“It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote,” Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, said in an interview published Sunday. “And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote.”
No one is predicting a Trump win quite yet, of course — as mentioned earlier, it’s too soon for that. But if left-leaning publications like The Times and Intelligencer are saying things are looking for good for the former president, that probably means a lot more than a 10-point lead in a Rasmussen poll.
