According to the latest Morning Consult national tracking survey, it appears that former President Donald Trump, who is considered the likeliest Republican presidential nominee for the 2024 election, currently holds a 2-percentage point lead over President Joe Biden. Specifically, Trump is polling at 43%, while Biden is at 41%. This marks a change from the previous week’s update, where the two candidates were in a tie.
The shift in these numbers suggests that Biden is trailing behind Trump in this survey because fewer voters who supported him in the 2020 election are showing support for his re-election bid.
Specifically, only 81% of the voters who backed Biden in the 2020 election said they would vote for him again if the election were held today. In contrast, 88% of those who supported Trump in the 2020 election expressed their intention to vote for him again in the upcoming election.
Question: If Trump is flipping 20 percent of Biden’s 2020 supporters, shouldn’t the former president be ahead by more than 2 percentage points?
Answer: Trump is doing very little flipping. Ninety-six percent of those previous 2020 Biden voters were anti-Trump then and still are. However, due to their dissatisfaction with Biden, they are more likely to get behind a fringe or third-party candidate.
We saw this in 2016 when the anti-Trump vote was split between Hillary Clinton and third-party candidates. In fact, it arguably cost her the election.
In 2020, Biden simply brought back those disgruntled voters, creating a coalition of liberal and moderate Democrats with varying viewpoints and top-level concerns.
Biden’s 2024 strategy: Change the minds of voters who supported him in 2020 but don’t plan to do so next year. He has over 10 months to get it done.
How many voters does that entail?
President Biden doesn’t have to change all of their minds, but it would behoove him to get at least half of that 19 percent back. Hence, if 89 percent (instead of 81 percent) of 2020 Biden voters planed to support the president again in 2024, he’d be sitting in a much better place.
In Biden’s favor: President Biden doesn’t have to flip any Trump voters, so that’s half the battle.
He simply has to win back a bunch of anti-Trumpers who already voted for him in 2020. But, in some ways, that might be easier said than done if those folks aren’t optimistc on the ecnomy or are preoccupied with neagtive innuendo about Biden’s age.
Should the Biden Campaign fail, expect Trump to win in 2024 with 46-47 percent of the popular vote. Electorally, it would look a lot like 2016.
This data indicates that there may be some challenges for Biden in terms of retaining the support of his 2020 coalition, while Trump seems to have maintained stronger support among his 2020 voters. These shifting dynamics will likely be a focus of attention as the 2024 presidential election approaches.
