New polling from ABC News and Ipsos suggests that President Joe Biden will replicate his 2020 election win against former President Donald Trump in their expected rematch later this year.
Among likely voters, Biden led by four percentage points — almost directly on par with the national margin by which he led in the final results from 2020. Though polling comes with the usual caveats, like the limitations of making resolute predictions from small margins and the role of the electoral college in eventually selecting the next president, national numbers can still provide somewhat of a barometer for a given presidential race’s eventual outcome.
Biden’s lead was only one percent among registered voters.
The numbers all rebuff the predictable idea from Trump’s corner that the ex-president-turned-criminal defendant is actually seeing soaring success in polling from the latest presidential race. Consistently, the portrait actually given by polling is more mixed, suggesting a close outcome.
In the meantime, Trump continues facing criminal trial proceedings in New York City that are set to continue again this week with additional courtroom testimony. So far, jurors have heard throughout the prosecution’s initial presentations from witnesses including tabloid media figure David Pecker and longtime Trump ally Hope Hicks, in terms of the more well-known of those appearing. Trump is charged with falsifying business records in connection to hush money from before the 2016 elections, and one legal expert — Norm Eisen, a frequent face on CNN — characterized Hicks’ testimony as especially damaging in relation to that.
He noted that Hicks had expressed, among other things, distrust of past attempts by Trump to push responsibility for that disputed hush money for a woman named Stormy Daniels on to Michael Cohen, an ex-ally. And Hicks also spoke broadly to the de facto state of emergency in Trump’s circles around that time, lending credibility to prosecutors’ concurrent argument of an ambition to target the 2016 presidential election to help Trump.
