Barring some extraordinary event, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be running against each other again this November. According to public surveys, a substantial share of the electorate simply does not believe that this will be the case. Could this dynamic be influencing early national head-to-head polling between Biden and Trump?
More than 550 polls have been tracked since January 2023 in Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s polling average, and Trump currently leads Joe Biden by 2.2 points nationally. On Election Day in 2020, Biden led Trump by more than 7 points, per polling averages, and he won the popular vote by 4.5 points. Since then, Trump has been impeached for inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government and is currently facing 91 charges in state and federal courts.
So, what gives? Why is Trump polling ahead this time?
Perhaps it’s the president’s age: Biden will be 81 years old on Election Day and would be 86 at the end of a potential second term. Poll after poll has shown that voters are seriously concerned that he is too old for the job. Fairly or not, voters are much less concerned about Trump’s age (he’ll be 78 on Election Day and would be 82 at the end of another term).
Trump also has a trust advantage on key issues; according to New York Times/Siena polling from October, voters think the former president would do a better job on the economy, national security, immigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Biden has a narrow advantage on democracy and a larger one on abortion.
But there is another possible explanation for Trump’s strong poll numbers: voters don’t fully understand that we’re headed for a rematch.
Pundits, analysts and political junkies (such as ourselves) can read the tea leaves and know that a rematch is all but certain. But voters aren’t so sure. When we speak to our less politically engaged family members and friends (i.e., normal people), we often get asked some version of the following: “Are you sure Biden’s going to run again? Isn’t he pushing it a bit at his age? And Trump winning the primary again? Seriously? Isn’t he going to prison?”
To the extent that voters are shielded from the impending reality that 2024 really will be a rematch, their responses to head-to-head surveys might not reflect how they’ll actually vote in November.
At least, that’s what Team Biden is hoping for. According to a New York magazine profile, the Biden campaign believes that once voters tune into the race, they’ll remember why they voted for the president over his predecessor the last time. And there’s some evidence for this view: CNN has reported that in Biden’s internal campaign polling, three-quarters of undecided voters do not (yet) believe that Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee.
Public polling paints a similar picture. According to Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation polling from January, 47 percent of voters think that Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee, and only 39 percent of voters think that Biden is very likely to be the Democratic nominee. When asked who they thought would win a rematch, 43 percent said Trump, 33 percent said Biden, 7 percent said someone else, and 17 percent were unsure. YouGov’s polling paints the same picture: as of February, 43 percent of Americans thought Trump would win a rematch, compared to 36 percent for Biden.
Those numbers, obviously, do not sum to 100 percent. Perhaps the remainder of voters believe that the nominees won’t be Biden and Trump and, when they realize that it is in fact going to be a rematch, their responses to surveys will revert closer to those of the 2020 election.
This outlook may seem overly optimistic for Biden, but prediction markets appear to support it. Prices on the PredictIt market “Which party will win the 2024 U.S. presidential election?” imply that Democrats have a 53 percent chance of winning the White House. Republicans held a structural advantage in the Electoral College in 2016 (when the tipping point state was 2.9 points to the right of the popular vote) and 2020 (when the tipping point was 3.8 more red). According to Sabato Crystal Ball’s J. Miles Coleman and Kyle Kondik, “The Electoral College is still likelier than not to continue to have a Republican bias in 2024.” Therefore, these odds imply that Biden is expected to win the popular vote by approximately 2-3 points.
Metaculus, a different prediction aggregator, currently gives Trump a 50 percent chance of winning the election and Biden a 47 percent chance. That site’s aggregate of state-by-state forecasts shows the Electoral College on a knife’s edge, with Democrats at 276 electoral votes and Republicans at 269. In short, the prediction markets think the presidential election is a coin toss.
In the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill polling averages, Trump leads all seven core swing states.
If the election were held today, it would not be close — Trump would walk away with it, winning 312 electoral votes.
Polling captures a snapshot of voter preferences today for an election nine months from now. Prediction markets represent the aggregate opinions of those paying close attention to all of the different factors that may influence the outcome on Election Day.
There is a clear gap between what polls are saying and what people with money on the line are forecasting. Should the surveys prove more accurate, Trump would win the popular vote and secure a sweeping victory in the Electoral College. Or perhaps the traders are right, and voters will sour on Trump as they tune into the race. Only time will tell.
Milan Singh is a data science fellow at Decision Desk HQ. Follow him @milansingh03. Ryan Gest is a data science and digital content fellow at Decision Desk HQ. Follow him @RyanGestEPO. Zachary Donnini is a data science fellow at Decision Desk HQ. Follow him @ZacharyDonnini. Havish Netla is an elections technology fellow at Decision Desk HQ. Follow him @havishnetla.