A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that former President Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden handily if the presidential election were held today. Meanwhile, the survey also showed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would best the embattled Democrat president, but former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley would fall short.

Trump’s numbers against Biden continue to improve as he holds an impressive 49-41 percent lead, while DeSantis only edges the president by one point, 42-41. Haley, however, would be beaten by Bumblin' Joe 38-36 (with 21 percent undecided), and we would be forced into another four disastrous years of this incompetent administration.

When it’s Trump versus Biden, 79 percent of Republicans would choose the former president, but when it's DeSantis that number drops to 68 percent.

🇺🇲 2024 Presidential Election Poll

Donald Trump (R): 49% (+8)
Joe Biden (D-inc): 41%
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Another candidate: 8%
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• @Rasmussen_Poll | 968 LV
• D36/R33/I31 | Jan. 7-9 | MoE: ±3%https://t.co/0K9qGzmP1y pic.twitter.com/sRWv6nrSOh

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 11, 2024

Biden’s approval ratings meanwhile continue to stink:

The survey of 968 likely voters was taken January 7-9 and concerns the general election and how the candidates would fare; it does not reflect voters' opinions about the upcoming primaries and caucuses. Rasmussen noted that the margin of sampling error was +/- 3 percentage points with a "95 percent level of confidence."

Polls are just polls, and as we know, they're often wrong. In 2016, pollsters had arguably their worst year when survey after survey showed Hillary Clinton far ahead of Donald Trump -- one outfit gave her a 99 percent chance of winning -- only to see Trump send her packing back to New York.

Still, they give you a general sense of where things are, and Trump's eight-point lead certainly has Dems quaking in their boots. Of course, there's no shortage of surveys out there, and some of them show Haley doing better than she did with Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen data runs counter to a poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal which showed Haley with a double-digit lead over Biden. Even the Journal tacitly acknowledged the results were an outlier, explaining that Haley’s numbers were driven by a group of voters “too small in our poll to yield precise numbers.” The Journal added these voters “tend to have college degrees, more so than do voters overall.”

Meanwhile, a Suffolk University survey of 500 Iowa voters likely to participate in Monday's GOP presidential caucuses showed Haley pulling ahead of DeSantis 20-13. Still, neither of them is close to catching the former president in the GOP primaries.

So no, none of these polls are a guarantee of anything -- but the fact that a consistent number of them from different organizations show that Trump would defeat Biden cannot be ignored, especially considering that many of them are widely considered to be biased toward the progressive side. Certainly some of these folks would rather be reporting that Trump was going to get thrashed by Biden, but they just can't ignore their own numbers.

Things are not looking good for Joe Biden.