Key Point: America is stuck in a forever cycle where half the country can’t wait until their next chance to cast a ballot.
“If the election were held today…” are six words that we’ll likely be hearing a lot for the next year. It is a side effect of the deeply divided nation, and largely began in early 2015 as the country was gearing up for the 2016 presidential race.
Donald Trump won, and half the country was elated – while the other half simply never accepted the real estate mogul turned reality TV star as “their president.”
For four years, attempts were made to cast the president as illegitimate – while Democrats sought any and all excuses to find a way to impeach him. Trump eventually helped on that matter of course.
There were also endless media reports of “who could beat Trump,” but it was only after the global Covid-19 pandemic up-ended the world in the late winter and early spring of 2020 that Trump became seriously vulnerable. Then after Joe Biden defeated Trump in November 2020, Republicans then became the ones who started to ponder whether they could take back the White House.
Thanks to the divide, we’ve been largely in a non-stop election cycle for going on eight years – and likely between now and Election Day in November 2024, there will be polls released ad nauseam!
Moreover, it is unlikely they’ll actually mean anything.
Case in point, two new polls offered contrasting views of who could win the White House next year.
The first, a new “gold-standard” Marquette Law Poll, released on Wednesday, shows President Joe Biden ahead of Trump by nine points in the key battleground state of Wisconsin. Biden tops Trump 52 percent to 43 percent, outside the poll’s margin of error. Yet, in a match-up between Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the same survey sees Biden at 49 percent to 47 percent for DeSantis. The “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin may or may not be as fortified as the 2022 election suggested.
Based on that polling, Trump can’t win the state – and that hurts his chances of winning the general election.
However, a Quinnipiac University poll, also from Wednesday, shows Biden and Trump in a dead heat in Pennsylvania – with the former president at 47 percent compared to the current president at 46 percent. This is even more notable as it is another Blue Wall state that proved vital to Trump’s win in 2016 as well as Biden’s in 2020. The Quinnipiac poll didn’t include a match-up between Biden and DeSantis, but it does suggest that there isn’t much of a Blue Wall left in the Keystone State, which could prove to be key to any campaign’s road to victory next year
Those are just two of the latest polls of course and present a micro view.
For a macro view, a new national poll, conducted by NBC News, showed Biden edging out Trump 49 percent to 45 percent – and is nearly identical to the popular-vote margin in 2020. This would suggest that a rematch will have the same outcome as 2020, and likely means the country will remain deeply divided.
Even worse, it suggests that if Biden and Trump are the eventual nominees, that divide is unlikely to be healed regardless of who wins. And it will likely result in the losing side already looking ahead to 2028.
Welcome to the new reality of American politics.
We’re stuck in a forever cycle where half the country can’t wait until their next chance to cast a ballot.
Author Experience and Expertise
A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.
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