Is Trump pulling away from Biden? It’s a legitimate question to ask after another release of battleground state polls showing the former president ahead in more than enough states to put him back in the White House. The latest results show Trump not just ahead in the states we believed to be pivotal, but potentially widening their number.
Just three weeks ago, Bloomberg-Morning Consult released polls showing Trump leading in four key states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona), tied in Michigan, and slightly trailing in Nevada. The significance of these six states is that they all gave Biden narrow victories — and thus the presidency — in 2020.
On Sunday, the New York Times-Siena released polls of the same six states. These results showed Trump leading in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona and trailing only in Wisconsin — and there by just two percentage points. What’s more, in every state except Wisconsin, Trump’s position had improved versus Biden.
If we simply average the results of both polls, Trump leads in every state but Wisconsin, where he is tied with Biden.
A quick look at 2020’s results and the 2024 Electoral College map shows the impact such results would have. In 2020, Biden beat Trump 306 to 232 in the electoral vote count. While that 74- vote margin seems large, it was the product of narrow wins: Biden won by less than three percent in the popular vote margins in all six key states; by less than one percent in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin; and by less than two percent in Pennsylvania.
Assuming that in 2024 Trump holds all the states he won in 2020, he will have 235 electoral votes — three additional coming from the intervening reapportionment of congressional seats. He will need just 35 electoral votes to get to the 270 needed to win the presidency.
The six states Biden narrowly won in 2020, and now recently polled, account for 77 electoral votes. Trump would need less than half those electoral votes to win in 2024; in fact, by winning just Georgia and Pennsylvania, he could gain the 35 electoral votes he needs. If the averaging of the two polls holds up in 2024 results, Trump would effectively switch places with Biden in the electoral college vote: 302 to 236.
The results of these two polls should be more alarming still for Democrats. Compare the difference of the average of these two polls with the 2020 popular vote percentage results and Trump has seen a considerable improvement. On average over the six states, Trump’s margin has improved by 4.5 percentage points.
While 4.5 percentage points may seem small, remember how close all six battleground states were in 2020. Now consider whether Trump’s improvement is not just limited to these six states. What if it is a general national improvement that has just not been revealed in other states as well?
Such a broad improvement would bring additional states from 2020 into play. Biden won five states in 2020 by margins between just over seven percentage points and just over ten percentage points. Together those five account for 36 electoral votes.
Both Minnesota (7.1 percentage point margin) and New Hampshire (7.3 percentage point margin) were on the low end of that scale. A 4.5 percentage point improvement in Trump’s performance would flip both states — and 14 electoral votes — in 2024. Maine (9.1 percentage point margin) would be right on the cusp of flipping, while Virginia (10.1 percentage point margin) and New Mexico (10.3 percentage point margin) would be close too.
If Biden sees the number of battleground states increase from his 2020 win, he will have to spend precious resources to defend what were presumably “safe” states for him. He would have to fight to hold these five, in addition to fighting to hold the six he won narrowly in 2020.
Conversely, it would give Trump huge leeway in his effort to win the 35 votes he needs for the presidency. If there is indeed a general drift to him equal to that described, he would have eleven possible states, not six, and their 113 electoral votes, not just 77, in which to capture the 35 electoral votes he needs.
Of course, there is a caveat in mixing, matching and averaging results from different polls taken at different times and in different ways. Still, a trend is clear. Whether Trump is rising or Biden is falling, the electoral vote map appears to be expanding and tilting toward Trump.
And there is another caveat to also consider. In 2020, Biden racked up a 4.4 percentage point margin in the popular vote to achieve his comparatively narrow electoral vote win. There is no indication that Biden is anywhere near that level of separation from Trump now: The Real Clear Politics average of national rematch polling has Biden trailing Trump 44.7 percent to 45.6 percent.
Right now, the bottom line for Democrats is clear: Polling shows that Biden is well behind the overall margin he needs to win in 2024, and he is behind or in trouble in the battleground states that the presidential election presumably hinges on. Finally, if the particular polling trends are also occurring more broadly, there may be more battleground states than formerly anticipated.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.