Poll Predicts Bad News for Joe Biden Even if He Wins Popular Vote

A new poll has projected that President Joe Biden could lose to former President Donald Trump in 2024 even if he wins the popular vote.

A year before voters head to the polls, a new survey from Stack Data Strategy, first reported by Politico, found Trump—his likeliest Republican rival—would beat Biden in the Electoral College, 292 to 246, if the election was held today. But the market research firm found Biden, a Democrat, remains on course to narrowly win the popular vote, 49 percent to 48 percent.

Trump has dominated the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, continuing to poll far ahead of his rivals despite four criminal indictments and other legal challenges.

To reach its forecast, Stack polled 15,000 Americans and used the findings to project the results down to the state level.

According to Stack, Trump's projected win is based on him flipping back four key states that he won in 2016 but were carried by Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Those states were won by Biden with the closest margins in 2020. The projected swing back to Trump is also forecast to have tight margins, with Arizona projected to be won by 1.4 percent, Georgia by 3.3 percent, Pennsylvania by 2.3 percent and Wisconsin by 0.9 percent.

While Biden is forecast to win two battleground states in Stack's projection, those also remain tight. Nevada is projected to be won by Biden by 1.4 percent, while Michigan is projected to be won by 0.7 percent.

Recent polls by The New York Times/Siena College also found Biden trailing Trump in five swing states.

Stack's projection also shows that there would be no advantage to either Democrats or Republicans changing their candidate.

The model projects that Trump would beat both California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris, while Biden would win in a landslide, 359 to 179, if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the Republican nominee.

"No one should be under the illusion that Trump can't beat Biden in 2024," Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London in the U.K., told Newsweek.

"All the recent polling we've seen blows to smithereens the notion that Trump is somehow unelectable. It's true that he has a ceiling on his support. But it's also true that Biden's approval ratings are abysmal, loosely propped up by a progressive base that wishes he weren't even running."

The "big X-factor" is whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or another third-party candidate "can make major inroads," Gift added. "Even someone who could capture a few percent of the vote in certain swing states could easily tip the balance one way or the other," he said.

Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Biden campaigns for comment via email.