New Polls Show Trump With Strong Leads Over Primary Challengers, Biden

A string of new polls released over the last few days from the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, and the Des Moines Register show former President Donald Trump is in a strong position over his primary challengers and President Joe Biden in the 2024 general election.

Summary

A string of new polls released over the last few days from the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, and the Des Moines Register show former President Donald Trump is in a strong position over his primary challengers and President Joe Biden in the 2024 general election.

• Trump maintains a sizable lead ahead of the Iowa Caucus despite skipping debates and barely campaigning, according to the new Des Moines Register Iowa poll. The former president has support from a majority of voters – 51 percent – with his leading challengers trailing far behind.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trails in second place with 19 percent, picking up three points from the October Iowa poll. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley remains static at 16 percent. Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Christie Christie are in the low single digits.
• The new Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday morning shows Trump with a narrow lead, 38 percent to 36 percent, which is within the poll’s margin of error. 
• However, when independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is included, Trump’s lead widens to five points. Trump would lead a three-way general election with 36 percent, with Biden trailing at 31 percent and Kennedy pulling 16 percent of the vote.
• The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey found Trump ahead of Biden by four points, 47 percent to 43 percent, a lead that balloons to six points if Kennedy and other third-party candidates are included. Trump would lead a multi-way matchup 37 percent to Biden’s 31 percent, with Kennedy far behind with 8 percent.
• The WSJ poll didn’t only contain good news for Trump, however – it also had some eye-popping results for Nikki Haley. According to the WSJ survey, Haley is by far the strongest Republican candidate in a general election – she leads Biden by 17 points, 51 percent to 34 percent.

• As the New York Times observed of the Iowa poll, “Multiple Republicans have ended their presidential campaigns over the past two months, narrowing the field against former President Donald J. Trump — but the only person who has gained much ground in the first voting state is Mr. Trump.”
• NBC News, which cosponsored the Iowa Poll, expanded on its findings. Trump’s lead is “the largest recorded so close to a competitive Republican caucus in this Iowa poll’s history” and his support is bolstered by a majorities of evangelical voters and likely first-time attendees of the Iowa Caucus.
• CNN’s latest poll of two key battleground states found Trump leading Biden outside the margin of error. Trump is ahead of Biden by 49 percent to 44 percent in Georgia, and holds a wide 50 percent to 40 percent lead in Michigan. Trump narrowly won Michigan and decisively won Georgia in 2016, before losing to Biden in both states in 2020.

• The New York Post elaborated on the CNN battleground state poll. One finding the Post highlighted was that Trump “is winning support from voters who didn’t participate in the 2020 election by a 26-point margin in Georgia and a 40-point margin in Michigan.”
• National Review pointed out that Trump’s lead in the WSJ poll marks the first time he has ever led Biden in that poll in the 2024 election cycle. One nugget NRO highlighted was the failure of Biden’s “Bidenomics” branding: 53 percent say Biden’s economic policies have hurt them, while only 23 percent say they support his economic agenda.
• Breitbart’s John Carney argued Trump’s strong poll numbers are having a measurable positive impact on consumer confidence in December. A consumer confidence index tracked by the University of Michigan unexpectedly soared by 13 percent in December, and UMich survey director Joane Hsu has a theory about the cause: “Sentiment for these consumers appears to incorporate expectations that the elections will likely yield results favorable to the economy” – which Carney argues leaves a clear implication that “the increase in sentiment is being driven in large part by Republicans and Trump supporters who are increasingly confident that they will win back control of the White House next year.”

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© Dominic Moore, 2023