Biden Takes Lead Over Donald Trump (Still Loses to DeSantis) – President Joe Biden is objectively the worst US president of the modern age. Because he is likely facing off against former Republican President Donald J. Trump, the least popular president in decades—certainly the most controversial—the forty-sixth president has a better chance of winning reelection than he should.
The End for MAGA? Donald Trump Is Losing in the Polls
According to a recent WPA Intelligence (please note that WPA Intelligence’s CEO is Chris Wilson who runs the pro-Ron DeSantis Never Back Down PAC) poll conducted last week, 47 percent of the 1,571 registered voters polled believe that Biden is preferable to Trump.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by four-point-five percentage points. It was narrow but more than enough that Biden needed to achieve victory over Trump. More troublingly for the Trump Campaign and the wider Republican Party is that Biden is crushing Trump among independent voters by a whopping 14 percentage points.
Trump is a Loser to Independent Voters
It is this number that should most concern Trump and the GOP. After all, it is among independent voters that Trump has always failed to perform well. What’s more, these independent voters are the deciding factors in modern elections.
Enough of them broke for Trump in 2016 to give him his historic (and unlikely) victory over Hillary Clinton then. This same group put Biden over-the-edge against Trump in 2020. Right now, it seems that the independent voter is poised to put Biden, however unpopular he may be (and he is), back into the White House.
As terrible as Biden’s approval rating is among voters, Trump’s ratings are worse. Whereas Biden has a mere 39 percent approval rating (with 54 percent sharing an unfavorable view of the forty-sixth president), Trump carries an appalling 32 percent favorability rating (compared to an astonishing 62 percent unfavorable rating among voters).
This is an interesting turn, since not more than a week ago President Trump was ahead of Biden by seven points. It seems that seven is, indeed, the lucky number for the 2024 Presidential Election.
What happened since Trump’s favorable polling data was released and Biden’s came out to counter it? Is it just dueling polls with differing methodologies and sample sizes?
That is certainly a factor. Though, that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Trump’s Legal Woes: Helps with Republicans, Hurts Him with Independents
What happened between then and now is that former President Trump was found to have been liable for defamation against New York-based journalist E. Jean Carroll in her civil case against Donald Trump.
More damagingly, a Manhattan jury found that Trump was guilty of sexual assault—battery—against Carroll. According to Carroll, she was sexually assaulted by Trump in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the early 1990s.
It should be noted that this was the second of several problematic legal cases that the forty-fifth president is being made to contend with.
The first was the obviously politically motivated Stormy Daniels case in which Trump was indicted by a Manhattan court based on a grand jury investigation conducted by District Attorney (George Soros funded) Alvin Bragg.
According to Bragg, Trump paid hush money to the pornographic actress in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential Election, and failed to properly file that payment to the IRS.
His recent case involving Carroll was the next hit to Trump. While it’s fair to say that Trump was never going to be let off the hook entirely by a Manhattan jury (most of New York loathes Trump), to say that it was entirely politically motivated is a bit much. The jury, for example, did not find Carroll’s claims of rape provable and stayed away from it.
They instead favored a lesser charge of battery (the sexual assault claim). And Trump was guilty of defaming Carroll on his social media app, Truth Social.
Next up for Donald Trump are two more serious cases (with the Stormy Daniels case ongoing) involving an Atlanta grand jury investigating claims that the former president attempted to steal the 2020 election in Georgia as well as a Washington, D.C.-based grand jury investigation into Trump’s purported mishandling of classified documents.
Trump’s political fate is now inextricably tethered to his legal fate. Paradoxically, as it relates to the ongoing GOP Primary, each time a jury finds against Trump his numbers among likely Republican Party voters increase.
More problematically for the former president, however, is that with each indictment or guilty verdict, Trump loses critical support among independent voters. This only empowers his rivals, notably Joe Biden, who is both protected by the mainstream media and is not undergoing the same level of legal woes (the corruption charges against Hunter Biden notwithstanding) that Trump is being made to endure.
DeSantis Drubs Biden
Another WPA Intelligence poll from February indicates that Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a likely challenger for Donald Trump in the GOP Primary, shows that Biden would lose by five-to-six points to DeSantis, if the two men faced off against each other in the General Election.
Specifically, the poll determined that Biden is trailing DeSantis is five of the six key battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), while DeSantis and Biden were tied in Wisconsin, with 45 percent support each.
Trump, meanwhile, trailed Biden in each of those six battleground states by one-to-two points. These states are home to larger independent voters, so that should not come as any surprise to those of us who remain detached from picking sides this early in the presidential election.
Biden-Harris as Mondale-Ferraro?
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the weakest Democratic Party nominees since Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro challenged Republican President Ronald Reagan and his running-mate, Vice-President George H.W. Bush. Yet, the Republican Party is in total disarray. It is torn between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
Because of his hold on the party faithful—the base—Trump is poised to win the nomination (although DeSantis has yet to announce and fully initiate what will be a well-funded campaign).
And the Democrats, by hook-or-by-crook, badly want a damaged Trump to be their opponent in 2024. If it is another Republican, DeSantis, Biden will get creamed as badly as Mondale was by Reagan (DeSantis, of course, is the most Reagan-esque candidate since Ronaldus Magnus walked among us).
MORE: The Collapse of Kamala Harris
MORE: Kamala Harris Is Falling Apart
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
