Former President Donald Trump is performing better in both the national polling average and in battleground states.
With less than two weeks until the general election, former President Donald Trump is performing significantly better in national and battleground state polling than he did in both 2016 and 2020.
According to an average of national polls compiled and published by RealClearPolitics on Oct. 22, Trump is trailing Harris by less than a percentage point.
On the same day in 2020, Trump trailed President Joe Biden by 7.9 percentage points.
In 2016, he trailed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 6.1 points.
Trump, who’s making his third run for the White House, ultimately lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020.
The polling averages published on Oct. 22 show Trump led the Democratic Party’s candidate in all seven battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that may well decide the outcome of the Electoral College.
The former president is performing better in each state than he did in 2016 and 2020.
Top pollsters in the United States say this could be interpreted as a sign that polls are doing a better job of capturing the on-the-ground sentiment of voters than they had in the past two presidential elections.
They also said the polling is a significant indicator that Trump is running a close race with Vice President Kamala Harris and may well have the advantage heading into Election Day.
“It is a dramatically even race,” Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, told The Epoch Times. “[It’s] far more tightly contested according to polling than the last couple of elections.”
“Right now, he looks very much more viable than he did in 2016 and 2020,” David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told The Epoch Times.
Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports’ head pollster, said his polls indicate that “Trump is locked in to win the national popular vote.”
Methodology Improvements
In his past two runs, Trump exceeded the expectations set by statewide polling in the seven battleground states.
