Trump Leads Biden By Strong Margin, Polling Average Shows

A three-way general election matchup between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Joe Biden, and former President Donald Trump is starting to look like a foregone conclusion according to an average of recent polling.

According to RealClearPolling, the former president and Republican frontrunner is carrying a healthy lead over his two rivals in national polls, averaging a 5.3% advantage across 21 surveys taken since the start of October last year. Those results peg President Trump at 41% average support among the electorate while President Biden earns 35.7% and RFK, a Democrat-turned-independent, collects 11.7% of respondents. President Biden has not reported a lead in a single national poll this year.

The results serve as another reminder that, as much as the mainstream media wants to convey that there are still around 200 days until Election Day and President Biden has plenty of time to make up the difference, Trump’s staying power is proof that putting him down will be a Herculean undertaking.

Major outlets including CNN and the New York Times reported on a NYT/Emerson College poll that showed Trump just one percent ahead of Biden, 46-45%, leading writers to suggest that the two “remain locked in a close race.” Widening the lens to view the totality of recent results, however, shows just how far behind Biden has fallen.

The Democratic incumbent is bearing the brunt of negative sentiments from respondents about the economy and direction of the country. Four of five polled rated the economy as fair or poor while 59% disapproved of the president’s job performance.

The latest poll comes as President Biden prepares for a series of campaign stops through swing states where he has also become extremely vulnerable. On Friday he dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris to Arizona, site of a recent state supreme court ruling that essentially outlaws abortions based on an archaic 1864 law, where she ripped into President Trump for taking credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“Here in Arizona they have turned back the clock to the 1800s to take away a woman’s most fundamental right – the right to make decisions about her own body,” the vice president said, adding that women in the state now “live under one of the most extreme abortion bans in our nation”.

“The overturning of Roe was, without any question, a seismic event and this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” she said, according to the Guardian.

The Biden campaign’s focus on abortion, however, may not be resonating. Politico’s Playbook reported Monday morning on an internal poll of 400 voters, conducted by the Trump campaign, which shows just 16% of likely November voters ranked their top issue of the moment as “Abortion/women’s rights” or “Arizona abortion ruling/abortion ban.” The war in Gaza was tied with abortion as the top issue.

Asked for their thoughts on what issues would sway their votes for president, respondents didn’t even put abortion in the top five. Inflation (22%), followed by taxes, government spending and debt (14%), protecting democracy (13%), honesty in government (13%), and immigration and border security (12%) were the most cited, with, only 3% citing abortion.