UPDATED 04/30/24
The latest results for the so-called battleground States are positive for Trump. I'll get to those after I review the national polls. I'll then remind you how Trump can win the election even if he "loses" the meaningless nationwide tally of popular votes.
NATIONAL POLLS
I introduced a new metric in Trump vs. Biden 11: the change in each pollster's results from poll to poll. For example, Trump was tied with Biden in the Quinnipiac poll that was conducted on April 18-22, and was down by 3 points in the Quinnipiac poll of March 21-25. That counts as +3 on the average date of the later poll: April 20. The full tally for all polls reported at RealClearPolitics since August 2023 looks like this:
Keep your eye on the red line. It spent a lot of time in negative territory from the middle of March to late April. But it's now back in positive territory.
Now, for the overall polls. I am dropping the "poll of polls", which aggregates all national polls reported by RCP, regardless of bias and frequency. It is too easy for polls often-published polls with a strong bias (usually pro-Democrat) to make things look worse for Trump than they actually are. (Demoralization of Trump voters is a main objective of such polls.) From here on out, I'm sticking with two, more selective, bias-adjusted measures of the nationwide balance between Trump and Biden.
First is a collection of all polls report by RCP, with two adjustments. I use only the latest results from each pollster, to avoid overrepresentation. I adjust the results by the average of the anti-GOP bias reported by RCP for 14 nationwide polls. I add that value (3.3 percentage points) to Trump's 5-poll average. Here are numbers, which include the results of all nationwide polls reported by RCP as of today:
Trump slipped somewhat from the middle of March to early April. The trend since then is positive.
The other collection of nationwide polls that I am keeping tabs on is a smaller set, in which each poll is adjusted for the amount of bias shown by the same pollster in 2020:
In this case, Trump's rebound is clear and convincing.
"BATTLEGROUND" POLLS
The other bit of good news for Trump is that he is doing better in the "battleground" States than he was when I last wrote about them (here). All of the polls underlying my previous report were conducted in March. There is now a new round of polls, conducted in April. In general, it looks better for Trump:
THE BOTTOM LINE
Can Trump win the election without "winning" the meaningless nationwide tally of popular votes? Of course he can, thanks to the Electoral College. He did it 2016, when he "lost" to Hillary Clinton by 2.1 percentage points. He almost did it in 2020, when he "lost" to Joe Biden by 4.5 percentage points. And he would have won in 2020 except for "election interference" by the Democrats on a massive scale. You can read all about that here. I'll save you the trouble of wading through more than 200 links. Here's the punch line:
Through a combination of information control, partisan management of election processes, outright fraud, ballot harvesting, and failure to apply election laws on the books, the presidential election of 2020 was stolen by a cabal of super-rich elites, crooked politicians, crooked lawyers, and judges who either didn’t want to hear the truth or were blinded to it by partisan considerations. For a systematic treatment of much of the chicanery mentioned in the preceding sentence, see Mollie Ziegler Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Regarding outright fraud, see “Last Thoughts on Voter Fraud” (The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, December 11, 2020) and “The Most Secure Election in American History?” (Gatestone Institute website) for thorough wrap-ups.
Let's hope that an army of better-armed poll-watchers and lawyers working for the GOP can keep it from happening again.
In any event, it's my view that if the average of the final ten (unadjusted) polls gives Trump a lead of 1 or more points, he will win the election.
Stay tuned.