It seems that it is quite fun to be a Republican in the United States. The party that has not won the popular vote in a presidential election in twenty years now has a candidate who has been leading the national polling aggregate for ten months now. And, following the calamitous debate in June, President Trump’s lead in the RealCleaarPolitics aggregate jumped up to 3.4 points nationally in the head-to-head race, and as high as 4.9 points in the five-way race.

We are at a point where six sitting Democratic members of the House of Representatives have openly called on President Biden to give up the party’s nomination, and an additional three have reportedly done so behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Jared Golden, a Democrat representing Maine’s second district, has penned an opinion piece titled ‘Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine’ in the local paper Bangor Daily News.

This series of events may trigger some flashbacks in some to the 2016 presidential election, where polling showed Hillary Clinton having a massive lead and members of his own party urged Donald Trump to quit the race. Similarly, in the 2022 midterm elections, insiders anticipated a big win for the GOP in the House and the Senate, which never materialized. The party only won a narrow majority in the lower chamber and actually lost a seat in the upper chamber, thus failing to retake the Senate.

So, given all that has happened recently,

how confident can we be in Donald Trump’s victory based on polling?

The answer is: quite confident. In both 2016 and 2022, national polling was not very badly off at all. On election day 2016, the RCP average showed Hillary Clinton up 3.2 points in the popular vote, and she ended up winning it by 2.1 points—however, as we all know, she lost the electoral college. Similarly, in the 2022 House election, the same polling aggregate showed Republicans up by 2.5 points on election day in the national generic ballot, and they ended up winning it by 2.8 points. Again, the issue was that the distribution of the support was not as it was anticipated, which resulted in Republicans losing key senator and governor’s races.

This leaves us with two scenarios which would allow for a Joe Biden victory in November.

The less likely, in fact almost impossible one, is that President Biden wins re-election but loses the popular vote. A president winning the election but losing the popular vote has happened five times in US history, and since the two-party system was established, has only happened to Republicans. That was the case four times, when President Rutherford B. Hayes won in 1876 (although the heavily disputed results were not officially tallied until February 1877), when President Benjamin Harrison won in 1888, when President George W. Bush won in 2000, and, finally, when President Trump won in 2016. Given that Democrats are now dominating the more densely populated urban areas, while Republicans have a big edge in the more scarcely populated rural areas, such a scenario for a Democrat President is even less likely now than it has ever been.

The second scenario is that President Biden sees a sudden surge in polling and overtakes, or gets very close to President Trump in national polling. This cannot be discounted as an impossible scenario.

However, President Trump has led the incumbent for almost ten months now in the RCP average, originally taking him over in mid-September 2023. There were a few days when they were briefly tied in October. Meanwhile, in the five-way race including independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Joe Biden has never led the polling aggregate for a single day since November 2023, when tracking of the five-way polling started.

Even President Trump led Hillary Clinton for brief periods of time twice in late May and late July 2016 ahead of the 2016 election, where he was regarded as the hopeless underdog by pollsters, pundits, and journalists alike.

More Bad News For President Biden

As for aggregating factors for President Biden, in both previous presidential elections, his challenger was heavily underpolled. At this time of the year, Donald Trump was underpolled by 4.5 points in 2020 and 2.6 points in the 2016 election. If we apply historical polling error to the current results—for which there is no guarantee that it is going to repeat—we get a similar margin of popular vote victory for Donald Trump to that of President Obama in the 2008 election.

Furthermore, the presidential approval ratings by Gallup have been shown to be very accurate for presidents in the last 72 years. The only POTUS that was badly underestimated by Gallup was Harry Truman—however, that was the first presidential term Gallup was ever polling, and his unexpected re-election happened 76 years ago.

As for presidents from Eisenhower onward, the lowest-rated incumbent in June of his re-election year who managed to win was President Obama in 2012. He had a 46-per-cent approval rating by Gallup in June 2012, which jumped to 50 per cent by election day and thus the 44th POTUS was given a second term in office by voters. President Biden, however, is polling far behind him, only having a 38-per-cent approval rating in June—and that was before his disastrous debate performance that alienated so many even in his own party.

The approval rating for the sitting POTUS is almost identical to President George H. W. Bush’s (37 per cent) in June 1992, who ended up losing the election to Bill Clinton by 5.6 points in the popular vote.

Given all that, Joe Biden is the heavy underdog with all major bookmakers in the upcoming US presidential election. It is even more interesting to look at sites like Predictit and Polymarket, where the odds are not set by oddsmakers, but are rather determined by users trading their bets for either candidate at prices they set. On Polymarket, as of the time of writing this, President Biden only has a 19 per cent chance of re-election, as opposed to President Trump’s 63 per cent chance of victory.

One might argue that the ‘laymen’ are heavily underestimating President Biden. However, they are people who also vote—popular opinion very much matters in elections.

Related articles: