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Forget the national polls that show the country has soured on President Joe Biden, and consider the Electoral College with less than 11 months until Election Day 2024.
Former President Donald Trump would need to flip three states Biden won in 2020 to complete his political resurrection and retake the White House – and a new set of CNN battleground state polls out Monday suggests that if the election were held today, Trump is most of the way there.
Biden, like Hillary Clinton, got millions more votes nationwide than Trump, but Biden secured the White House in 2020 thanks to the thinnest of margins in a few key states Clinton lost in 2016.
While national polling suggests the country doesn’t much approve of either Biden or Trump, it is battleground state polls like the ones CNN released Monday from Michigan and Georgia that should raise serious questions about Biden’s ability to make the Electoral College math work.
Assuming Trump secures the Republican nomination (a pretty good assumption at the moment), if he can flip Georgia and Michigan and their 31 combined Electoral College votes, he would need to flip just one more battleground state that Biden won in 2020. These include Arizona, with its 11 Electoral College votes; Pennsylvania with 19; or Wisconsin with 10.
That’s not to say Trump is a shoo-in. It will be a busy stretch of campaigning and criminal trials over the next year.
Trump faces federal and state charges for election subversion, charges for mishandling classified material, and charges in New York related to hush-money payments made on his behalf to an adult-film star who said in 2016 they had an affair. Trump denies that claim and maintains his innocence in all of the criminal matters.
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