What if there were a presidential election between former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden this year?
Emerson College’s polling society asked that question in a poll released toward the end of last week — and it was advantage Trump.
The poll found that the majority of Americans don’t approve of the job that President Biden is doing and that more people would vote for Trump if an election were held today than would vote for Biden — although neither of them would have the majority and the result was within the poll’s margin of error.
The poll showed that 41 percent of voters approve of the job that Biden is doing while 50 percent disapprove. When asked who they’d support in a presidential election between Trump and Biden, 45 percent picked Trump, while 43 percent picked Biden. Meanwhile, 11 percent of people said they’d prefer someone else — indicating that they would not vote for either one of the two. Only 1 percent said they were undecided in that match-up. The result fell within the poll’s 3 percent margin of error.
A presidential election where the Republican is either tied or winning the popular vote would favor the Republican; in 2000 and 2016, the winner of the popular vote was a Democrat who did not win the presidential election because the Republican won enough states to get a majority in the Electoral College.
Although the poll asked voters about a hypothetical Trump-Biden election, it didn’t ask these people whether they approved or disapproved of Trump.
The 2020 presidential election in which the two faced off was competitive. While Biden officially won the popular vote 51.3 percent to 46.9 percent while getting 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, it was a lot closer in the swing states.
The three states that determined the outcome of the election were Biden’s victories in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. He won the three states combined by fewer than 45,000 votes; Trump, however, claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the election and that he was the legitimate winner.
Conversely, Trump won a tight 2016 presidential election by fewer than 78,000 votes combined in three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as NBC points out.
Biden has said that he plans to run for re-election while Trump has not formally announced either way. However, Trump, who is eligible to serve one more term, has hinted many times that he plans to run again.
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