As of now, the odds appear favorable for the 2024 presidential election to be a rematch of the 2020 fight between former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden.
If that is the case, a recent poll suggested that Trump would defeat Biden to reclaim the White House by a fairly decisive margin, Just the News reported.
That same poll showed that if Vice President Kamala Harris were the Democratic nominee instead of Biden, she would also lose to Trump by an even larger percentage of the vote.
Trump would beat Biden or Harris
The Hill reported Monday on a new poll from Harvard CAPS-Harris that surveyed 1,990 registered voters between March 23-24 — a poll that pegged President Biden’s job approval at just 39 percent and showed majorities believing that the country and particularly the economy were on the wrong track.
That poll also put forward a hypothetical 2024 rematch between Trump and Biden and found that, if the election were held today, Trump would prevail by a margin of 47 percent to 41 percent for Biden, with 12 percent remaining undecided.
Likewise, if the 2024 race featured Trump against VP Harris, the former president would win with 49 percent of the vote compared to 38 percent for Harris.
Reflection of Biden’s poor performance
According to pollster Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris survey, the results of this poll were less about how popular Trump continues to be with many Americans and instead were more indicative of just how poorly Biden and Harris are viewed by the American people.
“I would not give a lot of weight to trial heats right now other than they reflect the weakness of Biden and the administration right now,” Penn told The Hill. “That Trump beats them both by a wide margin suggests most Republican nominees once known fully by the public would beat them unless they are able to pivot out of the current nadir in their numbers.”
Just the News pointed out that this particular poll didn’t appear to be much of an outlier, either, as a separate poll conducted recently by Emerson College of 1,023 registered voters between March 18-20 revealed a similar result in a hypothetical rematch between Trump and Biden.
In that case, Trump would win back the White House from his rival by a count of 45-42 percent, right at the threshold of that poll’s margin of error of 3 percent.
Biden’s dismal approval ratings
Meanwhile, that Emerson poll pegged Biden’s job approval rating at 43 percent with a disapproval rating of 49 percent, which is actually slightly better for him than the average approval-disapproval rating as determined by FiveThirtyEight‘s statisticians of 41.5 percent approval and 52.9 percent disapproval.
For comparison, the RealClearPolitics average of polls for Biden placed his approval at 40.8 percent and disapproval at 53.4 percent — all of which suggests that, should Biden prove incapable of significantly improving his numbers, former President Trump would have a decent shot at ousting his successor from office in 2024.
