It’s six months until the US election. Do pollsters know where their candidates are?

“You know what I hate?” Donald Trump asked in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday night. “When these guys get on television, they say – pundits, you know, the great pundits that never did a thing in their whole lives – ‘You know, we have two very unpopular candidates. We have Biden or we have Trump. These are very unpopular.’”

Watched by a crowd of adoring fans in Make America Great Again (Maga) regalia, against the backdrop of a plane marked “Trump” in giant gold letters, the former US president protested a little too much: “I’m not unpopular!”

Opinion polls disagree, showing Trump with a low approval rating thanks to voter concerns over his stance on abortion, his four criminal cases and the threat he poses to constitutional democracy. Fortunately for the Republican presidential nominee, Biden has job performance troubles of his own centred on inflation, immigration and his handling of the war in Gaza.

Call it the resistible force against the movable object. Six months out from one of the most consequential elections in American history, only a fool would bet with confidence on the outcome of the first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It’s almost impossible to imagine Biden winning when you start stacking up the case against him. The economy appears to be in decline with high inflation. You’ve got signs of the Democratic coalition fraying, including the extraordinary protests and arrests of youth on college campuses, the backlash among Arab Americans with regards to Gaza.

“You put that together and it’s like, how could Biden win? And then you turn to Trump and it’s, how could a candidate who’s openly