Donald Trump just massively under performed in Republican primary voting – again

In a perfect world, we’d be best off simply ignoring the 2024 general election polls this early in the game. General election polls rarely make any sense during primary season. The problem is that the media keeps misrepresenting what the polls even say, choosing only to highlight the polls that have Trump ahead of Biden, while ignoring the numerous polls that have Biden ahead of Trump.

But while we’re on the subject of polls, let’s talk about primary polling. President Biden keeps not only utterly dominating the Democratic primary voting, but also outperforming his primary poll numbers. If he’s supposed to win a state by sixty points, he ends up winning it by eighty points, and so on.

In direct contrast, while Trump is winning the majority of Republican primary states, he keeps underperforming his poll numbers. For instance in Virginia last night, Trump finished more than twenty points below what the polling averages said he would get. That’s not a one-off; Trump keeps seeing similar results in other states. He’s winning, but by a much smaller margin than the polls said he would.

This means that when the major polling outlets are conducting their Republican primary voting, they’re over sampling pro-Trump Republicans and/or under sampling anti-Trump Republicans – and they’re doing it in very large numbers.

If pollsters are this mistaken about Trump’s support within the Republican voting base, then it stands to reason that they’re also mistaken about Trump’s support in general election voting. The actual voting numbers say that anti-Trump Republicans are a much bigger group than the pollsters think they are.

Perhaps pollsters are being influenced by the media’s obsession with Trump’s base, and the media’s near-constant false claims that Trump’s base is the Republican base. But whatever has pollsters getting it so wrong in primary voting, that seemingly has to translate to general election polling on some scale as well.

Pollsters are saying on average that Biden and Trump are statistically tied in the general election. This means Trump has to worry that his general election polling might be as soft as his primary polling – which would mean that he’s behind Biden. Of course Trump, three weeks from his first criminal trial and deep into dementia, has more immediate things to worry about.