Since September of last year, former US President Donald Trump has consistently led incumbent President Joe Biden in national polls’ averages with a two-day exception in October, when the two contenders were tied. However, Trump’s lead has begun to expand and recent averages of national polling indicate that Trump is leading Biden 47.1 percent to 43.3 percent.
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By contrast, the 2020 polls showed Biden ahead of Trump by 7.2 percent on election day, whereas in 2016, when Trump upset Hillary Clinton, she was favored by 3.2 percent nationally. Unfortunately for Clinton, US elections use the electoral college system, where states are given a vote for president as opposed to direct election by popular vote.
In the electoral college, Trump also leads. In Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, Trump leads by around 5 percent. The outliers are the toss-up states of Wisconsin, where there is a tie, and Pennsylvania, Biden’s home state, where Biden is leading by less than the margin-of-error, at 0.6 percent.
In the Republican nomination, Trump, nationally, is beating second-place Nikki Haley by nearly 58 points with Trump having surged from 61 percent to 70 percent of the vote just since January 14. The next state where the two will face-off, South Carolina, is a bastion for Haley because she used to be governor there. Nonetheless, Trump is leading by an average of 30 points. Though things seem hopeless for Haley, not all agree that she should throw in the towel.
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Steve Moore, a Republican strategist who worked in the US Congress for many years, says: “Nikki Haley is smart to stay in the race. The American political environment and the world is as unstable as I have ever seen it. Quite literally, anything could happen. Half of Iowa voters and half of New Hampshire voters did not vote for Trump. More broadly, only a third of Americans say they want to see him run again. Haley has risen in the polls by campaigning on Ukraine. She is a longshot, but you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
Biden’s popularity has continued to plummet as immigration has become the top issue for Americans after the economy. Current polling shows that Biden’s approval rating of 39 percent, the lowest of any President since Harry Truman’s 36.1 percent in 1948, is allowing Trump to continue racking up voters who are dissatisfied by the President’s performance.
Jason Forrest, an American voter, blames “Western social media” as it is “being deluged with Russian disinformation networks, its paid influencers and troll farms, all posing as ‘regular American baseball man.’ People tend to outsource their thinking to the ratio and the ratio is owned by a Kremlin disinfo machine that now rivals the size of US multinational media empires.”
Recent reports indicate that Germany has uncovered a significant attempt by Russia to create chaos through the use of fake accounts and social media.
Forrest goes on to argue: “What’s worse is that the GOP now views this infoscape as the real electorate and caters to it, allowing this manufactured consensus to influence policy statements and increasingly policy itself. And sadly, demonizing Ukraine is the core effort behind 90 percent of Russia's influence operations in the West.”
What will come in November, in less than 280 days, is unclear. However, it seems increasingly likely that Trump will return to the White House.
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