Trump has momentum heading in to pivotal week in US election campaign

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Donald Trump enters a pivotal week in the 2024 presidential race with momentum as he prepares to lock up the Republican nomination, while Joe Biden tries to ease mounting concerns about his candidacy with a State of the Union re-election pitch.

Trump swept three more primary contests over the weekend and is expected to dominate on Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen US states will hold primary contests.

His easy victories come as new polls show him narrowly leading President Biden eight months ahead of the presidential election.

A survey in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday had Trump backed by 47 per cent of likely voters against 45 per cent for Biden. While this was a smaller lead than in the newspaper’s December survey, a poll in the New York Times the previous day had Trump’s advantage at 5 percentage points.

“Thus far Trump has been running an effective campaign, dragging down the president’s reputation, while Biden is struggling with the challenges incumbents face in moments of crisis — and certainly this is the case overseas,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University.

Biden can’t ignore the discontent in his party. Doing so is not an option in a turnout election

“Biden is also confronting the political wall of intense polarisation — which makes it hard to break through to large parts of the electorate in terms of the strengths of the economy and advances on public policy — and this same factor fuels fierce opposition to him.”

Biden has dominated the Democratic party’s early primary races, as incumbent presidents often do, and faces no serious challenger. But in a worrying sign for Democrats, the NYT-Siena College survey found that the majority of Biden’s 2020 supporters now think he is too old to be an effective president at age 81. Some of his allies on Capitol Hill are…