December 9, 2023

The Iowa caucuses are less than six weeks away, and only eleven months remain until Election Day 2024.  Right now, it appears possible that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be on the ballot for president.  So maybe it is a good time to see what voters think before the nomination process begins.

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Recent voter preference polls between President Biden and former president Trump have given us results that range from Biden +4 to Trump +6.  In the current Real Clear Politics polling average, Trump is up by +2.

For some reason, political analysts seem surprised by this.  However, if you look at the running average of Trump-Biden polls over the past year, you see them swapping leads several times.  In May of 2023, Trump had a lead of +2.5.  Joe Biden had a +2 lead as recently as August.  Other than the time of year, has anything really changed?

The first question everyone wants answered is, are the polls accurate?  The truth is, nobody knows for sure.  It depends on whom you poll, where you poll, how you weight your survey, and if some significant political event occurs when your poll is taken.

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To get some idea of if the polls are reasonable, a good place to start is the Gallup Poll of Party Affiliation.  If you look at the numbers for November 2023, the split is 29% Republican, 29% Democrat, and 40% independent.  If you average the eleven monthly polls for 2023, there isn’t much difference: 27.3% Republican, 27% Democrat, and 43.5% independent.

When party leaners are included, things change.  The average for 2023 gives us a split of 45% Republican and 43% Democrat.  Remember, these numbers are based on what the respondents were willing to tell the pollster.  For the record, during 2020, Democrats had a 47-43 advantage over Republicans in this same poll. 

This raises the question of why polls are usually biased toward Democrats.  In 2020, just before the election, CNN’s polling average had Joe Biden up by +10.  At the same time, the Real Clear Politics poll average had Biden up by over +7.  Biden actually won the popular vote by +4.5.

An interesting statistic regarding the 2020 election is the roughly seven million votes by which Joe Biden beat Donald Trump came from New York and California.  Among the other 48 states, it was a 50-50 split.  So where you poll does make a difference.

Right now, any national poll where the Democrat party affiliation number plus leaners is more than 4.5 percentage points higher than the Republicans may be biased.  Based on the Gallup poll numbers, a closer to even split could yield better results.  Interestingly, the Democrat/Republican split in the NBC poll was 40/39, Emerson was 37/35.5, and YouGov was 33/31.  Assuming I calculated the numbers correctly, the Messenger poll was roughly 33/39 in favor of Republicans, which could be biased toward the GOP.

Almost all of the polls in the current RCP average use registered voters.  A poll of all voters is supposedly the most inaccurate, while a survey of likely voters is usually the most accurate.  Since pollsters typically switch to polling likely voters closer to election day, the present polls are likely not as accurate as possible.