Former President Donald Trump has led incumbent President Joe Biden in 88 percent of the five-way race polls between Trump, Biden, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Cornell West and Jill Stein taken since Nov. 2023, according to RealClearPolling.com — and it could be putting the popular vote nationally into play for the first time in two decades.
Trump has led 29 out of the 33 polls taken nationally between the five candidates since Nov. 2023. Biden has only led two of those polls, or 6 percent, and only one of them was tied. Since national polls track the popular vote rather than the Electoral College, the implication is that the popular vote is up for grabs.
That’s significant because Republicans have been unable to win the popular vote since 2004, when George W. Bush was able to accomplish it in his reelection bid against John Kerry.
Other than that, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections: 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020.
2004 had been a high-water mark for the GOP, when Bush got 62 million votes. That total was not surpassed by a Republican nominee until 2016, when Trump got 62.9 million votes. And then again in 2020, when Trump got 74.2 million votes.
Comparatively, John McCain only received 59.9 million votes in 2008, and Mitt Romney got 60.9 million. Meanwhile, Barack Obama was able to top 69.4 million in 2008, and 65.9 million in 2012. Then in 2020, amid massive turnout during the Covid pandemic, Biden topped them all with 80 million votes.
Given Trump’s own track record for expanding the GOP base in 2016 and 2020, then, that made his inevitable run in 2024 quite attractive both from a standpoint of keeping his own base of Trump supporters together and with the demonstrated ability to build upon it with each successive run.
From the Republican Party’s perspective, the only thing better than Trump running twice might end up being have had Trump run three times.
And then, in a curious wrinkle, in 2024, with Kennedy running at an average of 12 percent in the five-way race polls—Trump has averaged 41 percent and Biden almost 38 percent—suddenly, the national popular vote is in play.
For Biden, the unfortunate aspect of Kennedy’s run — who initially was running as a Democrat before switching to Independent — is that Kennedy has been consistently pulling more votes from Biden than he has from Trump, setting up a potential spoiler situation.
In the five-way race, in the most recent polls, Trump is averaging a 2.5 percentage point lead, whereas in the two-way race, the lead narrows to 1 percent. To be fair, Trump has been leading a majority of the two-way race polls, too, but the margins are definitely narrower.
It goes without saying that all of this is a monumental shift in national polling that was seen in both 2016 and 2020, when the Democratic candidate was consistently leading the polls and predictably won the popular vote. Maybe not this time. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.