April 20, 2024
Is Biden’s Poll Surge for Real?
By John Kudla
We are now roughly six and a half months from election day or election month, depending on your state’s election laws.
Today, we’ll focus on Joe Biden’s recent polling surge, as shown in the Real Clear Politics Poll Average of Trump vs Biden. You will note Trump is up over Biden by a whopping 0.4 percentage points. If we remove the possible outlier Rasmussen survey from the average, showing Trump at +8, Joe Biden would be ahead by 0.4. Republicans might be dismayed by this, and Democrats encouraged.
In January of this year, Trump was ahead of Biden by +4. Since then, the poll average has tightened. Is this real, or is there something else going on?
Before getting into some poll internals, let’s see how a few polls have changed since the beginning of 2024. A good one to start with is Emerson.
1/26 Trump +1
2/13 Trump +1
3/05 Biden +2
4/02 Trump +1
4/16 Trump +3
Next, let’s look at the Economist/YouGov Poll.
1/07 Tie
1/14 Biden +1
1/21 Trump +1
1/28 Biden +1
2/04 Trump +1
2/11 Tie
2/18 Trump +1
2/25 Tie
3/03 Trump +2
3/10 Trump +2
Finally, let’s look at the Quinnipiac Poll.
1/25 Biden +6
2/15 Biden +4
3/21 Biden +3
Looking at the poll trend rather than the chatter, you might conclude that Trump was slowly gaining strength. But the RCP polling average contains different surveys in different combinations, some of which shouldn’t be included. For example, the Reuters poll is all over the map on results and highly inconsistent regarding the number of voters included from poll to poll. Here are the numbers.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/is_biden_s_poll_surge_for_real.html