Former President Donald Trump is hurtling toward the Republican nomination for the third time in as many election cycles, leaving the party’s voters with little time to grapple with one question.
Can Trump win in November?
The short answer is that he can. Trump is ahead of President Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average nationally, a lead that nearly doubles when third-party candidates enter into the equation.
Trump is beating Biden in all seven battlegrounds measured by the latest Bloomberg Swing State poll, including an 8-point lead in Nevada, the only one of these states the former president has never won previously.
And of course Trump won the 2016 presidential election despite never polling as well against Hillary Clinton as he is Biden right now. Even in his subsequent defeat in 2020, Trump was less than 50,000 votes in three states from securing a second term and exceeded 200 electoral votes, 38 short of what he needed to win.
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But there are also warning signs everywhere. Trump skeptics, especially within the Republican Party, note that not only did he lose the 2020 election to the very Democrat he would likely be facing this fall. He also presided over major Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections and played at least some role in the party substantially underperforming in what was supposed to be a much better environment in 2022.
Then there is the question of how secure Trump’s current lead is. The same Bloomberg-Morning Consult polling that demonstrates his strength against Biden also contains a huge cautionary note: 53% of swing-state voters would not vote for Trump if he was convicted of a crime. That number ticks up to 55% if the Republican is sentenced to prison.
Perhaps this is simply something voters tell pollsters because they presume it to be the correct answer and if it actually happened, it would fade into the ether like Jan. 6, both his impeachments and numerous other controversies that were supposed to mark his end. But given survey data that suggest independents take the criminal cases against Trump more seriously than Republicans do — the GOP faithful mostly regards them as politically motivated prosecutions and anti-Trump election interference — that’s not a sure bet.
The national polls do appear to be tightening as the reality of a Biden-Trump rematch sets in. Morning Consult has Trump up by 2 points, Emerson by just 1. Economist-YouGov has Biden ahead by 1.
Given Trump’s disproportionate strength in the battleground states, any one of those results is compatible with him winning. He did not need a popular vote plurality to win in 2016, nor did he receive one. But Reuters-Ipos, the Messenger-HarrisX, and Harvard-Harris all had Trump up by 5-6 points just days ago.
Most concerning for Republicans is a Quinnipiac poll that shows Biden winning 50% to Trump’s 44%, a 6-point lead. It is for now an outlier, and it does look like many of the polls Trump has outperformed in the last two elections, including the one he lost. But it also contains all the problems for Trump you would expect among independents and women if you are dubious of his chances of regaining the White House.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, the last major candidate standing in the way of Trump’s nomination, has made his general election riskiness her main argument since breaking 40% of the vote against him in New Hampshire. She leads Biden by 5 points in the Quinnipiac poll, beating the incumbent president by 16 points among independents, while Trump loses them by 12.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Haley’s campaign blasted out an email Wednesday with the following subject line: “Nikki pummels Biden, Trump once again falls short.”
“The Democrats are salivating at the idea of running against Trump again and they’re terrified of running against Nikki Haley,” her spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said in the statement. “Trump lost in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and Democrats know he’ll be a drag on the entire Republican Party in 2024. With Nikki on the ticket, Republicans will win up and down the ballot from the White House to the Senate to statehouses across the country.”
It’s not clear, however, that this message is working. Quinnipiac also found Trump trouncing Haley by 56 points nationally, with 77% to her 21%. That’s the same margin as the last national Economist-YouGov poll, in which Haley drew just 17%. Morning Consult had Trump breaking 80% against Haley nationally.
There is of course no national primary, though presumably, Trump would achieve these results in many states if these numbers are accurate. The RealClearPolitics polling average for Haley’s home state, the next contest in which she and Trump compete head-to-head, is much smaller.
At the same time, those polls are much older than ones that show Trump dominating among Republicans nationally. It would not take many primaries with Trump topping 70% — remember, he was supposed to top out at the 35% who are thought to be hardcore MAGA once this was down to a two-way race against a credible candidate — to make it difficult for Haley to continue.
That’s especially true if one of those blowouts occurred in the state where Haley lives and was twice elected governor.
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There is much uncertainty about the general election, though there is growing certainty that Trump will be the Republican nominee.
Haley has a short amount of time to persuade Republicans to let the former change the latter.
