Dem
51
GOP
49
With the caveat that the election is still almost 11 months away, a new batch of polls is interesting. In the RCP polling average, Nikki Haley beats Joe Biden by 5.8 points, Donald Trump beats Biden by 2.2 points, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) beats Biden by 0.9 points. That's a big difference. Also, the fact that multiple Republicans are beating Biden is more evidence that a fair number of Democrats are lukewarm on him and may sit out the election. It is not that Trump is suddenly getting more popular. Biden's problem is with Democrats, not Republicans.
Again, these are national popular-vote polls well in advance of the election, but the crosstabs are interesting. The results show that Haley and Trump would put together very different coalitions against Biden. In particular, Politico was interested in "Biden-Haley" voters; that is, people who would vote for Biden if he were running against Trump but would vote for Haley if she were the Republican nominee. This is a key voting bloc. One predictor of the Biden-Haley voter is whether the voter has a very unfavorable view of Trump. About 14% of these voters would vote for Biden against Trump but for Haley if Trump weren't running. These are likely old-school Reagan-Bush Republicans for whom Trump is simply unacceptable.
The data also show that 19% of the "double haters"—people who despise both Biden and Trump—would vote for Haley if she was on the ballot. Interestingly, this applies equally to men and women. Also, while in a Biden-Trump race, Biden wins the women easily, in a Biden-Haley race, among women it's a tie. In other words, there are quite a few women whose desire for a female president overrides any partisanship they have. Haley could apparently close the gender gap. This issue didn't come up in 2016 because many women were already planning to vote for the Democrat and the fact that the candidate was a woman didn't change that. Clinton was sufficiently reviled by Republican women that she wasn't worth voting for, even by women who would have liked a female president.
What Haley also does is pull college-educated women who were traditionally Republicans back into the fold. Trump repels these voters. And she does this without alienating noncollege white voters. In fact she does as well among them as Trump does.
Haley is already touting her "electability" but it is still an uphill climb for her. Many Trump voters would rather go down on the S.S. Trump than win with Haley. Her task is to convince them that winning with someone they don't like all that much is better than losing with someone they worship. It won't be easy. And don't forget that she's 30-50 points behind Trump in all the early primary/caucus states, so for the moment, all this discussion is purely academic. (V)