Joe Biden leads, but Democrats warn he could lose: While President Joe Biden leads former President Trump in a poll of a hypothetical presidential election rematch, Democrats are warning that a Biden re-election is far from a done deal.
Joe Biden Is No Lock for 2024
In a poll released earlier this week by NBC News, President Joseph Biden leads former President Donald Trump, 49 percent to 45 percent, in a hypothetical matchup of the general election. The poll also showed Trump with a huge lead in the Republican nomination contest, while not even bothering to poll the Democratic race.
The margin does, however, fall within the survey’s margin of error, and the poll had Biden tied with Gov. Ron DeSantis in that hypothetical matchup.
According to RealClearPolitics, direct polls between Biden and Trump have gone back and forth in recent months, with the current average favoring Trump by a mostly statistically insignificant 0.2 percent. Trump leads a recent The Messenger/Harris X poll by 2 percent, but Biden led the last three polls before that, including the one from NBC.
It is very early, with the 2024 election day still 17 months away. But it’s looking a lot like Biden vs. Trump again- and some Democrats are worried that it’s not quite a done deal.
Democrats admitted to NBC News that there’s a very real chance that Trump could win, notwithstanding his two outstanding indictments and numerous other legal troubles.
“If you think otherwise, you have literally had your head buried in the sand,” former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), who ran for president in 2020 and for the U.S. Senate in 2022, both unsuccessfully. “You’re living in a world of delusion. And it’s dangerous.”
“The president has a done a lot to help working people, and the threat of a Donald Trump presidency is very real,” Mandela Barnes, another defeated Senate candidate from 2022, in Wisconsin, told NBC. “It was Wisconsin that put Trump over the top in 2016. … We take the threat very seriously.”
Faiz Shakir, who was Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager in the 2020 race, told NBC another reason why Trump has a good chance.
“Trump is so amoral that he’s able to reinvent himself on issue after issue and deceive enough people to feel like they might give him a second look, at least in some critical battleground states,” Shakir, said in the story. “A lot of it hinges on, are there outside events that kind of prevent him from doing the reinvention?”
New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz made a similar argument back in April, that Trump may very well could win the 2024 election.
“there is reason to believe Trump’s odds of victory in 2024 would be at least as good as his odds in 2020, when he came within 45,000 well-placed votes of winning,” Levitz wrote. There are other reasons to imagine the possibility of a Biden loss, from his advanced age to the possibility of a recession between now and the 2024 election.
“Even though Trump has myriad demerits as a general-election candidate, he isn’t devoid of peculiar strengths,” Levitz said. “The mogul is far less wedded to the conservative movement’s ideological project than many of his rivals. Unlike DeSantis, Trump has never endorsed the privatization of Social Security. And, to this point, he has been less acquiescent to the anti-abortion movement’s maximalist demands than the Florida governor has.”
Once again, the start of voting is a long way away, and numerous major events will happen before it begins, from Trump’s various legal entanglements to whatever may or may not happen with the economy or foreign crises. Anything could happen during the many-candidate Republican nomination contest, and there’s no telling what could happen with the health of two men who are 77 and 80 years old.
But as of right now, the most likely scenario for the 2024 election is Trump against Biden, yet another.
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
From 19FortyFive
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