The ghost of Hillary Clinton is haunting Trump

Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 win relied upon his ability to breach the “blue wall,” picking up three states that Democrats had reliably won since 1992: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2020, he lost those states, along with Republican mainstays Arizona and Georgia. Now, based on current polling, it looks as though the 2024 Biden-Trump rematch may yet again come down to the “blue wall” states – and this could be a hard-fought battle indeed.

For over six months now, national polls have given Trump a small but consistent lead over the incumbent president. In the RealClearPolitics average of a head-to-head race, Trump’s lead has mostly bounced between one and two points since the beginning of the year (polling that includes the third-party candidates often gives Trump slightly more of an edge). In the 2020 cycle, Biden consistently led Trump by a considerable margin, so Biden’s polling disadvantage has caused his Democratic allies to reach for the emergency button and maybe some antacid.

But – as Hillary Clinton knows all too well – presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote. All that matters is getting to 270 electoral votes. There, the math may be a little more complicated. At the moment, polls give Trump a considerable advantage in both Arizona and Georgia. Let’s return those to the Republican column. Trump has also been polling well in Nevada, sometimes with a double-digit lead. The Silver State has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004, and it has broken Republican hearts in federal races for years now. Still, for the purposes of this argument, let’s also give its 6 electoral votes to Trump.

Assuming Trump wins all the other states he clinched in 2020, that would put Trump at 268 electoral votes – two short of winning the presidency outright. This brings us back to Michigan (15 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). For Trump, those are the battleground pick-up opportunities where the polling is closest, so he might have to win at least one of them to reclaim the White House.

Polling in those states is very, very close. Trump’s advantage in the RealClearPolitics average is strongest in Pennsylvania, where he has a 2-point lead over Biden in a head-to-head match-up. However, Biden was leading in the RCP average as recently as April. Wisconsin and Michigan are photo-finish close, with Trump leads at a mere fraction of a point.

History sends mixed messages here. On one hand, Trump has a record of overperforming his polling – especially in Wisconsin and Michigan. Based on that record, a tie in polling might translate to a Trump victory once the votes are counted.

On the other hand, Trump-aligned Republicans also underperformed their polling in many of these states in the 2022 midterms. Many polls released prior to election day gave Mehmet Oz a slight lead in the Pennsylvania US Senate race. Instead, Democrat John Fetterman won by 5 points. Maybe the fact that 2024 is a presidential election – with a broader electorate than in midterm years – means that limited lessons can be extracted from 2022. Still, that underperformance is a warning to Republicans not to put too much faith in narrow polling leads in battlegrounds.

Another detail from the midterms stands out. Republicans won the House “popular vote” by close to 3 points – but the GOP barely wrested the House away from Democrats. If only a few very close races had broken differently, Democrats could have retained control of the chamber even while losing the “popular vote.” This is a major change from the 2016 election, when Republicans only won the House “popular vote” by a single point but also racked up a sizable majority in that body. The coalitions of both parties have shifted since 2016, and that has electoral consequences.

All things considered, you’d prefer to be the candidate who has to win only one “blue wall” state rather than the one who has to hold all of them. Trump may thus still have an advantage. But polling indicates how intense the political combat could be in battleground states in the months ahead.