IT IS A FACT THAT DONALD TRUMP OVER PERFORMED HIS POLLS by 2.7%.
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However, there are several caveats .
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Incumbent president Donald Trump was the first president to yield more than fifty one percent of the vote to his challenger, neither Ford nor Carter nor George Herbert Walker Bush managed to do that.
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President Donald Trump increased the number of people who voted for his opponent by fifteen million votes in only four years. That is a tremendous feat.
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It is a fact that Donald Trump is leading in the polls
by one point one percent (1.1%).
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Since 11/1/23 to 2/14/24, here are the polls that have Trump at 50 or greater percentage of the vote:
Messenger1 10/31-11/1 51
CBS News 10/30 - 11/2 51
Marquette 11/2-11/7 52
Fox News 1 11/10 - 11/13 50
Reuters 11/13 - 11/14 51
Harris1 11/15-11/16 53
Messenger2 11/15 - 11/19 53
Messenger3 11/22 - 11/28 52
Messenger5 11/27 - 12/1 53
Fox News 12/10 - 12/13 50
Harris2 12/13 - 12/14 52
CBS News 1/10 - 1/12 50
Messenger6 1/15 - 1/16 52
Harris3 1/17 - 1/18 53
Messenger7 1/17 - 1/21 53
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Donald Trump has NEVER won 47% of the popular vote of the electorate in a general election nor 49% of the popular vote in Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in a general election .
Trump's electoral record when on the ballot
|
Trump
2016
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Clinton
2016
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margin
2016
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trump
2020
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biden
2020
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margin
2020
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Michigan |
47.5% |
47.27% |
11K
.23%
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47.84% |
50.62% |
155K
2.78%
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Wisconsin |
47.22% |
46.45% |
23K
.77%
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48.82% |
49.45% |
20.7K
.63%
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pennsylvania |
48.18% |
47.46% |
44K
.72%
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48.84% |
50.01% |
81K
1.17%
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2016 |
46.1% |
48.2% |
2.9M
2.1%
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2020 |
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46.8% |
51.3% |
7M
4.5%Gallup
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Donald Trump has NEVER EARNED MAJORITY JOB APPROVAL.
Gallup
Last Trump Job Approval 34%; Average Is Record-Low 41%
- Approval ratings of Trump most politically polarized by wide margin
Trump is the only president not to register a 50% job approval rating at any point in his presidency since Gallup began measuring presidential job approval in 1938. Likewise, he is the only president who did not have a honeymoon period of above-average ratings upon taking office. His initial 45% job approval rating proved to be his high point for his first year as president.
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It is certainly understandable to want to correct the polling errors made in the previous election despite the caveats and limitations Donald Trump has manifest as a candidate, but the questions are (1) do those same factors that induced those polling errors in the 2016 presidential election, namely underestimating Trump's percentage of the vote, exist and (2) have significant possibly outcome altering events occurred since then ?
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We can not answer the first question with certainty, but we absolutely can answer the second question. This will be Donald Trump's first time to face the voters since Dobbs and the insurrection and the four indictments and 91 felonies were charged. I continue to believe that there are people who nominally would self-identify as on the left who are determined to drive President Biden from the ballot by indicating on polls that they will not vote for President Biden and there are others who would greatly prefer a non Trump Biden match up but would vote for President Biden if forced but who keep deluding themselves into a belief that a Trump Biden match up is not inevitable. Then there are people who are not paying attention to the general election yet and finally there are people who are still figuring out that the economy is very good. On the other hand, the Republican Party voters fell in line behind Donald Trump.
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Here are some of the articles about how Dobbs has affected elections.
What 538 says about how Dobbs has affected elections
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FiveThirtyEight
Dobbs Turned Abortion Into A Huge Liability For Republicans
Support for abortion rights is higher than it's been in decades.
And as the one-year anniversary of Dobbs approaches, many Americans are more supportive of abortion rights than they’ve been in decades.
Now, a FiveThirtyEight analysis finds that after one of the most disruptive Supreme Court decisions in generations, many Americans — including women, young people, and Democrats — are reporting more liberal views on abortion than major pollsters have seen in years. Even conservatives, although the changes are slight, are increasingly supportive of abortion rights. There are other signs that longstanding views are shifting: For instance, Americans are more open to the idea of unrestricted third-trimester abortion than they were even a year ago. And although it’s hard to predict what will shape upcoming elections, there are indications that abortion has the potential to be a major motivator for some Americans when they go to vote in 2024.
Women, young people and Democrats are veering left
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From Forbes
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That is why data looking more specifically at gender differences among voters of the same party is so important. The latest NPR/Marist poll shows 74% of Democratic women and 72% of Democratic men—in contrast to 35% of Republican women and 19% of Republican men —oppose the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reminding us that partisan differences are much larger than gender differences on this issue. Perceptions of threat might also help to explain the jump in voter registration among women in the months leading up to Kansas’ 2022 primary election, when state legislators put an amendment to remove state constitutional protections for abortion rights on the ballot. Voter registration surged, with women accounting for about 70% of new registrants according to Target Smart, and voter turnout in August far surpassed any recent primary election. The result was an overwhelming rejection of the proposed amendment championed by conservatives in a state that had only two years earlier voted for Donald Trump by a 15-point margin.
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Whoever these people really are, their post has not aged particularly well
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Since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, election observers have raised questions about whether and how the issue of abortion will influence the outcome of the November midterm elections.
Some early survey evidence from May to July suggested a surge in support among Democrats and reproductive-aged women for abortion rights. So too did the results from an August 2022 Kansas referendum on abortion, where voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion. Democrats also overperformed compared with 2020 – that is, earning a higher proportion of the vote than they did in the 2020 election – in a series of congressional special elections following Dobbs.
More recent evidence, however, suggests that voter concern over inflation may trump abortion as a motivating issue.
We are a multi-university team of social scientists that has been regularly polling Americans in all 50 states since April 2020.
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Even the Grey Lady seems to have noticed
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Support for abortion rights appears to have been a major factor in the midterm elections, helping Democrats fare much better than expected in many places. Though Republicans seized control of the House, dashing hopes of federal legislation to codify Roe v. Wade in the next two years, the midterm results suggest that running on abortion can be a winning strategy for Democrats. The outcome offers lessons to Democrats looking ahead to a 2024 presidential election that could determine if a federal abortion ban is on the table.
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The Cook Report provides some sharp analysis here
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For much of the fall, there was a rolling debate as to whether rising costs and inflation or abortion would be more salient in the upcoming midterm election. By early November, it looked as if the economic concerns would win out.
In the end, both issues mattered to voters, but abortion mattered most to the kinds of swing voters who Republicans should have been able to win over, given President Biden's low approval ratings and the real-life squeeze rising prices were having on voters.
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Even Politico says this
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I Underestimated the Depth of Outrage’: A Year in Post-Roe America
Thinkers from across the political spectrum reckon with the dramatic and unpredictable ways the country has already changed since the historic Supreme Court decision.
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Catherine smartly provides the most incisive analysis of its impact upon the 2022 midterms
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The Impact of Dobbs v. Jackson on the 2022 Midterms
by Catherine Smart, Research Analyst
In the weeks leading up to Election Day 2022, there were plenty of reasons to expect a “Red Wave”, a large takeover by the Republican party. Historically, most midterms following the election of a new president see a large swing towards the opposite party in the House and Senate. With history as well as rampant inflation and President Biden’s low approval rating on their side, right-leaning pundits had plenty of ammunition. While several GOP candidates did close on their Democratic opponents in the polling the week prior to election day, the red wave predicted by pundits did not emerge, but the tightly contested races depicted by polling did.
Why didn’t the red wave fully materialize? It appears that inflation and economic concerns were not enough to fully overshadow the controversial overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson case this past summer. In October of 2022, the Kaiser Family conducted a survey and reported that more than half of the respondents felt it important to vote in this year’s elections because of abortion concerns, including 60% of women. Exit polls also showed that 33% of women marked abortion as their most important issue, ahead of 28% who marked inflation.
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This last article makes an important point. Historically over the last century, there have been three instances in which the party in power did not lose ground in Congress. The inflation right was nine percent in July of 2022. President Biden's job approval rating hovered around 40 percent. In 2010, the Democratic Party lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the US Senate . Ted Cruz famously predicted that the Democratic Party would lose 50 seats in the House of Representatives and 5-7 seats in the Senate.
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Then we have the event of the insurrection. And the potential consequences of a felony conviction.
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This is how the voters feel about the insurrection
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In a new survey, Data for Progress asked voters about their views on the 2020 election and the events of January 6, 2021. We find that a majority of likely voters (58%) believe the 2020 presidential election was fairly won by Joe Biden, including 93% of Democrats and 54% of Independents. However, 63% of Republicans think the election was stolen from Trump.
While a majority of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen, a majority also believe that the violence on January 6 was not the right response. Nearly three-fourths of voters believe that supporters of President Trump “did the wrong thing by inciting violence and threatening our democracy” on January 6, including a majority of Republicans. These findings reflect no significant change from a previous survey in January 2023.
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Still this is less than optimal
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Do American politicians that clearly violate democratic norms lose significant public support, or does public opinion impose little constraint on anti-democratic politicians? Existing studies have examined this fundamental question using hypothetical survey experiments which, while valuable, suffer from ecological validity and weak treatment concerns. I overcome these problems by studying a novel quasi-experiment created by the fact that Donald Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection unexpectedly occurred while Gallup was conducting a nationally representative public opinion survey using random digit dialing. Comparing party identification among respondents that happened to be interviewed just before, and just after, January 6, 2021 suggests that the Republican Party retained 78% of its pre-insurrection support base during the first 1.5 weeks. Even this modest loss was short-lived—in February 2021 the Republican Party already stood at 93% of its pre-insurrection support level. While not zero, the public constraint on anti-democratic behavior is remarkably limited.
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The NY Times is clear on the impact of a felony conviction
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But if Mr. Trump is tried and convicted, a mountain of public opinion data suggests voters would turn away from the former president.
Still likely to be completed before Election Day remains the special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution of Mr. Trump for allegedly scheming to overturn the 2020 election.
The negative impact of conviction has emerged in polling as a consistent through line over the past six months nationally and in key states. We are not aware of a poll that offers evidence to the contrary. The swing in this data away from Mr. Trump varies — but in a close election, as 2024 promises to be, any movement can be decisive.
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A New York Times/Siena College poll last month got the ball rolling on this hypothetical. The swing-state poll showed Trump going from a four-point lead on Biden across those states to a 10-point deficit if he’s convicted — a massive 14-point swing on the margins. If the impact were even close to that, it would be likely to foreclose any real shot Trump had.
- A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed an even bigger impact. While Trump led Biden within the margin of error in a field including independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., taking 38 percent, just 25 percent said they would vote for Trump if he were convicted of a felony by a jury. Fifty-nine percent of voters overall and 31 percent of Republicans said they wouldn’t back him — numbers that would in all likelihood be prohibitive for him.
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The Hill notes the decisive consequences for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a felony upon the presidential election
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The poll, released Wednesday from Bloomberg and Morning Consult, found that 53 percent of voters in key swing states would refuse to vote for Trump if he were convicted of a criminal offense. A slightly higher share, 55 percent, say they would reach that conclusion if he were sentenced to prison.
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Rolling Stone tells us that Team Trump is becoming quite worried about the results of a conviction upon his probability of winning the 2024 presidential election
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The Polling ‘Disaster’ That’s Starting To Terrify Team Trump
Polls show a criminal conviction could torpedo Donald Trump’s chances in 2024 — and some of his close advisers are telling him to take it seriously
FEBRUARY 3, 2024 10:00AM EST
- ASAWIN SUEBSAENG AND ADAM RAWNSLEY
In the middle of last year, several of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, including some of his 2024 campaign’s senior staff, started noticing an ominous trend in independent polling and in internal Republican survey data: A significant share of swing voters in key states — even some Republicans — say they would not want to vote for a freshly-convicted criminal.
The trend spooked them enough that, in recent months, some of these officials and political allies have directly warned Trump of possible looming catastrophe ahead for his 2024 presidential bid, two people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
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There have been several new factors since Donald Trump last faced the voters that may have altered the political landscape enough so that a past trend may not apply in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Therefore, there doesn't seem to be a good basis for assuming that Donald Trump's over performance of the polls by 2.7% in 2020 (while increasing those who voted for his opposition by 15 million votes in four short years) will reoccur in the 2024 presidential election.
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