With less than six months to go until the November election, former President Trump has a slight chance of winning.
This isn’t due to national polls (where Trump holds only a very small lead) but rather his position in battleground states.
An average of polls maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) has Trump ahead of President Biden in all seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump’s leads vary widely, from more than 5 points in Nevada to just 0.1 points in Wisconsin, but Biden won every battleground state except North Carolina in 2020. It’s clearly significant that the incumbent president is now trailing everywhere.
Biden’s predicament is exacerbated by voter dissatisfaction with the economy, rifts within his party over Israel and Palestine and persistent concerns about his age.
The Hill/DDHQ average gives Biden an approval rating of 40 percent, but 56 percent of Americans disapproval of his job performance.
Trump’s dominance is extraordinary, given that his numerous controversies would have ruined anyone else’s political career.
Trump is the only president to be impeached twice. The second time was for inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He is also the only president to be charged in a criminal trial. Trump’s hush money trial is nearing completion in New York. Trump has also been indicted in three other cases, bringing the total number of charges against him to 88.
But Trump has a famously strong base of support: the New York trial has not had a significant impact on his approval ratings, and he handily beat his rivals for the Republican nomination earlier this year.
His closest rival, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, announced Wednesday that she would vote for Trump in November’s presidential election.
So things are looking relatively good for Trump, but big problems could still occur.
Here are five of them.
Criminal conviction
This is the most immediate danger, but the scale of the threat is not entirely clear.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll drew attention for finding that one in five Trump supporters would likely reconsider their support if he were convicted of a felony.
However, only 4% of them said they would withdraw their support, while the remaining 16% of those opposed to Trump said they would “reconsider” their support for Trump.
Given Trump’s insistence that the charges he faces are politically motivated, his near-certainty that he will appeal his conviction, and the general loyalty of his MAGA brigade, it’s not hard to imagine that the majority of Trump’s supporters will ultimately stick with him.
But a guilty verdict would be a blow in itself, a shocking rebuke to Democrats’ “don’t elect criminals” campaign and likely cause pause among at least some moderate voters.
Some in the Republican Party remain uneasy about Trump, and Haley has continued to garner around 20% of the vote in recent primaries despite suspending her campaign in March.
Meanwhile, an acquittal of Trump in New York would embolden him and make it easier to tarnish his other cases, none of which are guaranteed to be heard before the election.
A verdict is expected soon in New York, with Judge Juan Marchan expecting closing arguments to begin on Tuesday.
Debate disaster
Trump has been clamoring for a debate with Biden and his wish is likely to come true.
In an unusually fast move, an agreement was reached last week to hold the debate in Atlanta on June 27. The second debate is scheduled for September 10. The first will air on CNN, the second on ABC.
Trump abandoned his usual approach of setting expectations, calling Biden “the worst debater I’ve ever faced” and saying, “He can’t string two sentences together.”
Such boasts from Trump lower the bar that Biden must clear.
Trump avoided all debates during the Republican primaries, arguing they were a waste of time because of his large lead in the polls, but this could weaken his performance in June.
It’s not just gaffes during debates that are dangerous.
Now that Trump is on the brink of the Republican nomination, what he plans to do in a second term will likely come under greater scrutiny.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, he outlined an approach that critics have decried as authoritarian.
In the interview, Trump left open a range of possibilities, including firing federal prosecutors who refuse to follow orders to indict anyone, pardoning people convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attacks, allowing states with strict abortion laws to monitor women’s pregnancies, and carrying out mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
Abortion Election
The basis on which the election is fought will be important.
There are plenty of issues where Biden and the Democrats are really weak, including immigration and the economy, and the division of the Democratic base over Israel’s attacks on Gaza is itself a problem.
But Democrats have one big trump card: abortion.
Social conservatives won a major judicial victory in June 2022 when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and abortion rights protections, but the issue has become a major political headache for Republicans ever since.
Liberals have won every statewide abortion vote in the past two years, including in Republican-leaning states like Kentucky and Kansas, and the issue has been widely blamed, including by Trump, for the GOP’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections.
A year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, an NBC News poll showed 61 percent of voters disapproved of the decision.
Abortion’s importance shows no signs of fading, with new measures being enacted: Florida’s six-week abortion ban went into effect earlier this month.
President Trump has attempted to sidestep the issue, saying in April that he does not support a federal abortion ban.
But the issue clearly carries risks for him, especially with suburban female voters, long considered a key demographic.
Being pulled along by other people or unexpected events
One of the big unknowns in the 2024 presidential election is who Trump will choose as his running mate.
Whoever the former president nominates will likely be heavily overshadowed, but the choice will still be crucial and could still fail.
Consider South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R), who was widely considered a strong candidate until she inexplicably included a story about her own experience killing her dog in her new book, forcing her into a disastrous media tour to promote it.
Whoever Trump chooses will have to choose someone who can withstand rigorous scrutiny.
Some on his team also worry about the impact of divisive candidates in other key state races, most notably Kali Lake, the highly controversial former news anchor who is the likely Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.
Of course, an unforeseen crisis could upset the election results. In 2019, no one expected that President Trump’s 2020 reelection would hinge on a global pandemic. Eight months ago, no one thought the Israeli-Palestinian issue could be a major factor in this year’s election.
Biden’s Crash against the “Blue Wall”
There is one silver lining for Biden in the polls — even if it is a pretty slim one.
It is increasingly unlikely that the president will be able to flip North Carolina to the Democrats, but excluding that, there are six other battleground states.
Several polls have shown a large gap between Trump’s approval rating in three Southern or Southwestern states (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) and three Northern states that were once known as the Democratic Party’s blue wall (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
In The Hill/DDHQ average, Trump is up between 3 and 6 points among the first group, but up less than 2 points among the second group.
Of course, polls can fluctuate between now and Election Day or simply turn out to be inaccurate.
But if Biden can win over the “blue wall” states, it could change the entire election campaign in one fell swoop.
If Biden wins those three states and Trump wins three Southern battleground states, and everything else remains the same from 2020, the president will be re-elected by a slim, nerve-wracking margin of 270 to 268 Electoral College votes.
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