With so much going for Joe Biden – the US economy is strong, inflation is falling, crime is dropping and his GOP opponent Donald Trump is about to stand trial on criminal charges in New York, the US president would expect to see a reward in the polls.
Finally, it may have come.
Biden has made significant gains in the past month in six of seven wing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the 2024 US election, according to a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll published on Tuesday.
US politics site Axios noted that for the first time in months, the swing state poll has Biden within striking distance of Trump.
The 81-year-old has bucked tradition by gambling a hefty $30m on an ad blitz and appearances in battleground states, spending bigger and earlier than the Trump and Obama reelection campaigns. It appears to be paying off.
The survey was undertaken in a period in which Biden made toured swing states and some Democrats began predicting that his investment in Rust Belt economies was paying off.
The US President also won plaudits for his punchy State of the Union address and made a series of sharp attacks on his Republican opponent.
“The White House has to be breathing a sigh of relief that new polls show Biden gaining ground on Trump, particularly in key swing states,” said Thomas Gift, director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London.
“Some of this could be a delayed bounce from the State of the Union address, in which Biden gave a robust performance and defied some of his critics intent on painting him as a doddering old man.”
While Biden’s numbers appear to be heading in the right direction, the polls suggest he still has work to do in most if not all of the seven battleground states.
Early in the election campaign, he still appears to be in a weaker position than in 2020, when he consistently led Trump in national and swing state surveys.
The latest survey showed Biden with a 1-point lead in Wisconsin and tied with Trump in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Biden moved closer in Nevada, trailing Trump 46-44 — well within the poll’s margin of error for the state. Trump’s lead maintained a 5-point lead in Arizona and a 6-point lead in North Carolina, despite some Biden gains.
The former president’s lead only grew in Georgia, where the survey put him ahead by 7 points, up from 6 last month.
Todd Belt, a professor of political science at George Washington University, cautions that the reports of poll movement “is all within the margin of error”.
Nonetheless, he detects positive signs for Biden. “There is a bit of a trend here, and I think it has to do with the fact that people have come to grips with the fact that Trump will be the nominee, and this scares a lot of people,” he said.
“I think it has more to do with the threat that Trump poses than anything else (which has been the pivot in the Biden campaign).”
Ominously, though, the Bloomberg poll appeared to confirm that third-party and independent candidates — especially Robert F. Kennedy Jr — could split the mainstream vote, and present a real risk for Biden.
In all swing states combined, Trump led Biden 47-43. When other candidates were included, Trump’s lead rose by a point, to 43-38. Kennedy got 9 per cent.
But Professor Belt said it was still early days in the 2024 election race. “As the campaign goes on, people flirt with the idea of not voting or voting for a third party, but when the choice becomes clear, they ‘come home’ to the candidate closer to them,” he said.
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg tweeted on Tuesday: “Biden bump is real.“
He told NBC that “large numbers of voters haven’t checked in” and “some of Biden’s coalition is still wandering”, so surveys show him struggling with young, Black and Hispanic voters. He predicted the polls will improve for Biden by “late spring” – around April or May.
The Bloomberg/Morning Consult researchers found that voters remain pessimistic about the national economy, but are increasingly optimistic about their local economy: 53 per cent said the economy in their city or town was headed in the right direction — a 4-point jump in the past month.
Other polls done in March put Biden ahead of Trump at a national level. They include a Mainstreet Research/Florida Atlantic University poll taken on 15-17 March that found 47 per cent of likely voters would back Biden versus 45 per cent for Trump and a 7-13 March Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Biden with a one-point lead.
As of Sunday, Biden’s approval rating reached 44 per cent, its highest since last October, according to a poll tracker by Decision Desk HQ/The Hill.