It was a poll that rattled the campaign world, disrupting the recent narrative that President Biden was closing the gap with former President Trump in the 2024 election rematch.<\/p>\n
A survey that went viral on Sunday indicated Trump topping his Democratic successor by six points in a head-to-head match-up and by nine points in a five-candidate ballot that included Democrat turned independent contender Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein and progressive professor Cornel West.<\/p>\n
The CNN poll conducted by SSRS was instantly used as evidence by pundits \u2013 and as ammunition by Trump and his team \u2013 of the waning of the perceived polling bump the president enjoyed coming out of his well-regarded and aggressive State of the Union address in early March \u2013 when he went for the jugular in primetime with numerous salvos fired at his Republican predecessor.<\/p>\n
Trump enjoyed the polling edge over Biden in an average of national horserace surveys dating back to last October, but the president\u2019s numbers edged up in the weeks after the State of the Union address.<\/p>\n
\u2018Biden\u2019s position in the polls is improving against Trump,\u2019 polling analyst Nate Silver said last month.<\/p>\n
But Daron Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and the Republican partner on the Fox News Poll, is skeptical.<\/p>\n
\u2018If you want to really parse one-to-two-point shifts one way or the other, then I suppose if you squint very hard, you can convince yourself that he [Biden] bumped up one or two, and now he\u2019s lost one of that,\u2019 Shaw said.<\/p>\n
Shaw, who served as a top strategist on former President George W. Bush\u2019s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, emphasized that \u2018the race has been fairly steady over much of the past nine months.\u2019<\/p>\n
Veteran pollster Chris Anderson, another member of the Fox News Election Decision Team, and the Democratic partner on the Fox News Poll, said that any bump was a small one.<\/p>\n
\u2018There seemed to be, at the very least, a stabilization after the State of the Union,\u2019 which tempered earlier perceptions of a Trump advantage.<\/p>\n
And showcasing recent Fox News polls in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, Anderson noted, \u2018There were signs in there of a little bit of progress for Biden, but again it\u2019s really small.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
While national surveys garner plenty of attention, the race for the White House is a battle for the states and their electoral votes, which places a spotlight on battleground state polling.<\/p>\n
Analysts argue over how much the State of the Union address fueled the slight rise in the polls by Biden.<\/p>\n
\u2018Simply Democrats coming home naturally, which they\u2019ll probably do, versus State of the Union stuff,\u2019 Shaw argued. \u2018The main thing about the State of the Union was that it sort of stopped a conversation that was corrosive to Biden, that he\u2019s too old and too feeble and not up to the task. That\u2019s still there, but at least there are not daily stories about it. That was, I think, the success of the State of the Union.\u2019<\/p>\n
The CNN poll was followed a couple of days later by a Marist College survey for NPR and the PBS NewsHour that indicated Biden edging Trump by two-points in a head-to-head match-up, and tied with his GOP challenger in a five-candidate field.<\/p>\n
A Quinnipiac University national survey in the field at the same time as CNN\u2019s survey indicated Biden and Trump tied in both head-to-head and five-candidate showdowns, while an NBC News poll conducted a few days earlier put Trump up by two in a two-person race and Biden with a two-point edge when the third party and independent candidates were added.<\/p>\n
With six months to go until Election Day, Shaw wondered whether the current polling dynamic would dramatically shift, baring major developments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pointing to \u2018an era of hyper-polarization where you\u2019ve got two candidates who\u2019ve already run against each other,\u2019 Shaw noted that many voters already \u2018know everything about both these two guys.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018So why would you expect much movement? What is it about this campaign that\u2019s going to educate voters? Which is usually what\u2019s happened in the past and why the numbers move around,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
Anderson agreed, spotlighting \u2018that\u2019s likely to be the story of this election as we go through, that the movement that we\u2019re going to see is likely to be in the margins because so many people are locked in.\u2019<\/p>\n
Six months out, Anderson said, \u2018it\u2019s not looking good for Biden, but at the same time, you can see how his base comes home, and he pulls his coalition back together and is suddenly a couple of points higher than he is now.\u2019<\/p>\n\n
It was a poll that rattled the campaign world, disrupting the recent narrative that President Biden was closing the gap with former President Trump in the 2024 election rematch. A survey that went viral on Sunday indicated Trump topping his Democratic successor by six points in a head-to-head match-up and by nine points in a <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":18676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}