The Democratic Party is not heading into the 2024 elections as some kind of substantially struggling institution, no matter the naysayers. Many Americans clearly prefer a platform of substantial action to protect health care and other needs in place of whatever theater House Republicans cook up.
While evidence suggests the 2024 presidential election will be close, the portrait was roughly the same before Joe Biden won nationally by millions of votes in 2020 — and now, new polling shows Biden winning a state that Donald Trump won in both 2020 and 2016. The nature of the polling and polling in general means this outcome is definitely not confirmed, but it’s an indication of a flip that goes against narratives of Democrats just losing all over the place.
The latest iteration of the Meredith Poll, from a team at the North Carolina institution Meredith College, found Biden leading Trump in North Carolina by one percentage point, with 40 percent of the support to Trump’s 39 percent. (“Someone else” got 17 percent, with “Don’t know” at five percent.) Since presidential elections in individual states are generally decided on a winner-takes-all basis, that’s obviously enough to hand Biden the electoral votes if the margins carry over to the general election next year. (That includes the people selecting “don’t know” also demurring in a general election with Trump and Biden.)
There’s recently been a spate of polling showing leads for Trump in key swing states… but there have also recently been elections around the country where Democrats prevailed, and it’s important to have a fuller picture. Democrats just recently held the governor’s chair in Kentucky, took unified control of both state legislative chambers in Virginia, and saw the success of a state Constitutional amendment protecting abortion in Ohio. (The state also passed a measure legalizing adult-use cannabis, as it’s known.)
Kentucky isn’t exactly known for leaning Democratic! The failed Republican candidate, Daniel Cameron, was endorsed by Donald Trump and had staked conventionally Republican positions on abortion. And he lost. In Kentucky. So that’s where we’re at as the 2024 elections approach!
