Donald Trump's Chances of Beating Joe Biden, According to Polls

President Joe Biden is expected to launch his 2024 re-election campaign on Tuesday, setting the stage for a potential rematch of his showdown four years ago with then-President, Donald Trump.

And like 2020, early polling shows it's likely to be a close contest.

Biden, now 80 years old, is already the oldest person to hold the office and had already faced doubts about a re-election bid due not only to his advanced age but his relative unwillingness to embrace policies favored by the left wing of his party.

While some potential Democratic challengers, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J.B Pritzker, have largely avoided talk of mounting a challenge to Biden, a pair of Democratic activists, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have already announced longshot bids against him.

The 76-year-old Trump, meanwhile, remains the de facto leader of the Republican Party, with a double-digit polling advantage over current and prospective candidates like Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Tim Scott in a fractured field.

He also boasts a growing list of endorsements from top figures in Congress already willing to support his re-election bid, helping consolidate party support even as some major donors have begun to defect for other candidates.

Also significant is the wide disparity in polling between himself and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a conservative firebrand some saw as Trump's heir apparent as he has flirted with his own bid for the presidency.

With the field divided, Trump stands to defeat DeSantis by double-digits under today's polling numbers. And if the election were held tomorrow, Trump currently stands to win his party's nomination by anywhere between 15 and 35 points based on current polling, leaving the rest of the field with significant ground to cover to be able to compete.

The question now is whether Trump—who famously lost the popular vote twice in both of his previous campaigns—can manage to turn the tide against Biden after his 4-point defeat in the general election just over two years ago.

Even running against a historically unpopular president, polls today show the prospect of a Trump victory in 2024 is already a risky bet for Republicans.

One of the few pollsters to examine likely voters—the conservative pollster Rasmussen—has delivered Biden's best approval ratings to date in some of their recent polls, even as they predicted him to lose by near-double digits to either Trump or DeSantis in a 2024 matchup.

However, while Biden's disapproval rating sat at 56 percent in a recent Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters published on March 29, Trump's disapproval rating was actually two points higher, at 58 percent.

Most in that survey also said that looming criminal charges against the former president—including those recently filed by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for alleged hush money payments he'd made to an adult film star during the 2016 election cycle—should disqualify him. And generally, most voters thought both candidates were more dishonest than honest.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's team via email for comment.

Ultimately, Biden's unpopularity doesn't matter against a candidate like Trump, the poll says, polling Biden at two points higher than Trump in the general election.

Other polls of registered voters over the past month project a similar result, particularly in the battleground states either candidate will likely need to win back the presidency in 2024.

In Wisconsin, a poll from Republican pollsters Public Opinion Strategies last week showed Biden defeating Trump by three points in the Badger State, compared to the dead heat he would likely face in a toss-up race against hypothetical candidate Ron DeSantis.

In Michigan, the same pollster has Biden beating Trump by three points as well, with DeSantis boasting a slight edge over Biden in the blue-leaning state. Other battleground states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona turned up similar results as well—a result of what some pundits claim is Trump's near-100 percent name recognition that leaves little room for inroads with undecided voters.

That's not to say it's all negative for Trump—particularly given the fact most pollsters have the two candidates separated by fewer than four points in most surveys.

An April 5 YouGov/Economist poll, for example, had Trump and DeSantis ahead of Biden by two and eight points respectively, with Biden's handling of the economy driving the significant share of discontent. (59 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Biden's performance addressing inflation, according to the crosstabs.)

Meanwhile, a Harvard/Harris poll published Friday shows Trump ahead of Biden by five points in a potential general election contest as the percentage of those who believed the country and the economy were on the "right track" approached previous high water marks seen during the Biden administration last summer.

The most important statistic for both men, however, might be the fact nobody in the country really likes either of them. In most polls, a majority of those surveyed did not want either of them to run again.