There are two key things we have at our disposal to assess the state of a presidential election. The first, of course, is match-up polling. The second is approval ratings.
Even when an incumbent isn't seeking reelection, the approval ratings of the incumbent party are still informative. Advertisement If you're following the approval and match-up polls at all this campaign, you know two things: Joe Biden isn't very popular, and Donald Trump is leading in most of the battleground states. Considering these two factors alone — and there are plenty more that suggest Trump is favored to win — things look darn good for President Trump in November.
Except, according to FiveThirtyEight, Biden is more likely to win than Trump. I want to shout out everyone who worked on this for the past 3 months. This was truly a team effort, with beautiful designs from our interactive team, meticulous fact-checking from our copy team, and a huge data collection effort by our research team.
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com/Qju92VRVPS — Nathaniel Rakich (@baseballot) June 11, 2024 Technically, Nathaniel Rakich, the senior editor and senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, calls it a toss-up, but, as the graphic he posts shows, out of the 100 simulations FiveThirtyEight ran, Biden won 53 times, and Trump just 47 times. In a separate post on X, he insists that FiveThirtyEight's model is based on polls and fundamentals. How is that possible? A day earlier, Rakich noted that Joe Biden's ap.