One Year Out
Looking ahead to November 5, 2024
To the extent the concept of Election Day still matters in the era of early voting, we’re exactly a year away from the 2024 election. Obviously, a lot can happen. Not only is there a considerably higher chance than normal that one or both of the likely candidates will die or be incapacitated by then, there’s an exponentially higher probability that one of them will be a convicted felon.
Remarkably, the criminal who was arguably the worst President in American history and who tried to steal the least election has to be considered a slight favorite at this point.
NYT (“Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds“):
President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
The requisite graphic:
Acknowledging all the caveats about polling this far out, this is simply remarkable. Trump is leading if five of six “swing” states Biden won three years ago.
Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.
Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction.
Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.
Add it all together, and Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden held a 2-point edge in Wisconsin.
In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six.
Honestly, these results are so baffling that I would dismiss this as a bad poll. Young voters care more about abortion and LGBTQ rights than older people, so how can they be trending GOP? Trump is widely perceived as a racist, so why would Blacks be swinging in his direction?
Alas, it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in pretty much every poll. And the reasons are the ones we’ve been seeing for months:
Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are both deeply — and similarly — unpopular, according to the poll. But voters who overwhelmingly said the nation was on the wrong track are taking out their frustrations on the president.
“The world is falling apart under Biden,” said Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist in Bloomsburg, Pa., who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 but is now backing Mr. Trump, albeit with some reservations. “I would much rather see somebody that I feel can be a positive role-model leader for the country. But at least I think Trump has his wits about him.”
Mr. Biden still has a year to turn the situation around. Economic indicators are up even if voters do not agree with them. Mr. Trump remains polarizing. And Mr. Biden’s well-funded campaign will aim to shore up his demographic weak spots. The president’s advisers have repeatedly noted that Democrats successfully limited the party’s losses in 2022 despite Mr. Biden’s poor approval ratings at the time.
Still, the survey shows how Mr. Biden begins the next year at a deficit even though Mr. Trump has been indicted on criminal charges four times and faces trial in 2024. If the results in the poll were the same next November, Mr. Trump would be poised to win more than 300 Electoral College votes, far above the 270 needed to take the White House.
Another ominous sign for Democrats is that voters across all income levels felt that Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them personally, while they credited Mr. Trump’s policies for helping them. The results were mirror opposites: Voters gave Mr. Trump a 17-point advantage for having helped them and Mr. Biden a 18-point disadvantage for having hurt them.
For Mr. Biden, who turns 81 later this month, being the oldest president in American history stands out as a glaring liability. An overwhelming 71 percent said he was “too old” to be an effective president — an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54 percent of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.
In contrast, only 19 percent of supporters of Mr. Trump, who is 77, viewed him as too old, and 39 percent of the electorate overall.
Concerns about the president’s advancing age and mental acuity — 62 percent also said Mr. Biden does not have the “mental sharpness” to be effective — are just the start of a sweeping set of Biden weaknesses in the survey results.
Acknowledging that Biden is very old and that I’m uncomfortable with that, one would think it would be canceled out by Trump being nearly as old and demonstrably less fit. And constantly saying crazy shit. But . . . not so much.
And the economy isn’t a set of top-level numbers but a sense of how people feel about their situation. Gas prices are finally coming down but the cost of housing, food, transportation, video streaming services and so many other things that are highly visible to voters are up—a trend likely to continue.
Voters, by a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, said they better trusted Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden on the economy, the largest gap of any issue. The preference for Mr. Trump on economic matters spanned the electorate, among both men and women, those with college degrees and those without them, every age range and every income level.
That result is especially problematic for Mr. Biden because nearly twice as many voters said economic issues would determine their 2024 vote compared with social issues, such as abortion or guns. And those economic voters favored Mr. Trump by a landslide 60 percent to 32 percent.
The findings come after Mr. Biden’s campaign has run millions of dollars in ads promoting his record, and as the president continues to tour the country to brag about the state of the economy. “Folks, Bidenomics is just another way of saying the American dream!” Mr. Biden declared on Wednesday on a trip to Minnesota.
Voters clearly disagree. Only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent.
Voters under 30 — a group that strongly voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 — said they trusted Mr. Trump more on the economy by an extraordinary 28 percentage-point margin after years of inflation and now high interest rates that have made mortgages far less affordable. Less than one percent of poll respondents under 30 rated the current economy as excellent, including zero poll respondents in that age group in three states: Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
“I actually had high hopes for Biden,” said Jahmerry Henry, a 25-year-old who packages liquor in Albany, Ga. “You can’t be worse than Trump. But then as the years go by, things happen with inflation, the war going on in Ukraine, recently Israel and I guess our borders are not secure at all.”
Now Mr. Henry plans to back Mr. Trump.
“I don’t see anything that he has done to benefit us,” said Patricia Flores, 39, of Reno, Nev., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but won’t support him again in 2024.
I have no idea how representative a handful of cherry-picked quotes from random yahoos are. But they do seem consistent with the top-line polling.
In 2020, Mr. Biden’s path to victory had been rebuilding the so-called blue wall in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and then expanding the map in the diversifying Sun Belt states of Arizona and Georgia.
The poll shows that Mr. Biden is notably stronger in the industrial northern states than in the more diverse Sun Belt.
And his vulnerabilities stretch across an expansive set of issues.
Voters preferred Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden on immigration by 12 points, on national security by 12 points and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 11 points. And though a 58 percent majority supported more economic and military aid to Ukraine — which aligns with Mr. Biden’s policy — that did not seem to benefit the president on broader questions of fitness to handle foreign affairs.
“I don’t think he’s the right guy to go toe to toe with these other world leaders that don’t respect him or fear him,” said Travis Waterman, 33, who worked in home restoration in Phoenix. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but sees him as “weak” now and prefers Mr. Trump.
The gender gap on national security was enormous. Men preferred Mr. Trump 62 percent to 33 percent; women preferred Mr. Biden 47 to 46 percent.
But even that’s bad news: the gender gap is typically much wider in favor of Democrats; 47-46 is within the margin of error.
Mr. Biden’s strongest issue was abortion, where voters trusted him over Mr. Trump by nine percentage points. Mr. Biden also maintained the trust of voters by an even slimmer margin of three points over Mr. Trump on the more amorphous handling of “democracy.”
But how strong an issue is abortion at the presidential level* now? It was huge when Roe was in danger but it’s unlikely a re-elected Biden would be able to appoint enough liberals to reverse Dobbs.
Democracy, on the other hand, would seem to be an issue of concern.
Mr. Biden has survived poor showings in polls before. In fact, in October 2022 in the run-up to the midterm elections, the president’s job approval rating was nearly the same as it is now. His party still managed to lose fewer seats than expected in the House and gained one seat in the Senate, in part by painting Republican candidates as extremists.
And many of them actually were. But voters are already wildly familiar with Trump, who has been in the center of the political stage since 2015. He spent four years as President!
One would think the four ongoing criminal trials would matter. But I think they’re already baked in, as is January 6. Unless he’s in prison or somehow ineligible to be elected, it’s not obvious why those who don’t already think Trump unfit are going to change their minds.
Today, the degree to which voters are turned off by Mr. Trump’s personality and bombast — which has been the glue helping keep together a fractious Democratic coalition for years — appears to have waned. Only 46 percent of voters said Mr. Biden had the proper temperament to be president, barely higher than the 43 percent who said the same of Mr. Trump. That said, Mr. Trump will be more in the spotlight in 2024, including his criminal trials, a growing presence that could remind voters why they were repelled by him in the first place.
Maybe!
I constantly remind myself that most people just aren’t paying attention. I’m sure a whole lot of people were barely following the January 6 hearings, for example. But I’m just not convinced that attitudes on Trump are shiftable at this point.
A related WSJ report (“The 2024 Election Rematch Americans Are Dreading Looks Likely“) reinforces my perspective.
A year before the 2024 election, a divided nation is stuck in a political loop: President Trump’s weaknesses helped deliver President Biden to the White House, and now the incumbent’s vulnerabilities could lead his predecessor to a comeback.
Biden, the nation’s oldest president at age 80, is poised to reclaim the party’s nomination, yet he has been dogged with questions about his age, frustration over his handling of the economy and anxiety about two wars. Trump, 77, has a comfortable lead as he seeks the Republican nomination for a third time, even as many moderate and independent voters are repelled by his repeated efforts to overturn the 2020 elections results and the many criminal indictments he faces.
The two are likely headed for a general election rematch that will unfold against a backdrop of discontent, pitting two unpopular candidates against each other on inflation, abortion and America’s role in an unstable world. Given the narrowly divided electorate, the outcome will hinge on a small slice of voters spread across a half dozen or so states, with the possibility of multiple independent or third-party candidates scrambling the results.
Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who represents a closely divided Omaha-based district, said he believed that in 2020, “a lot of people didn’t vote for Joe Biden, they voted for Donald Trump or against Donald Trump.”
This time around, he said, “I think the same issues that challenged Trump in our district are still there. People don’t like the name-calling, they want order.” But he added: “The difference this time is people are unhappy with Joe Biden’s performance.”
Gallup polling trends would seem too support this view:
There’s quite a bit more to the WSJ article but it mostly just reinforces points already made.
________________
*It’s obviously much more salient at the state level, where laws that are more or less restrictive have real impact.
Oh, for flying flock sake! At first glance, it sounds like the usual WSJ whack the Demorats, but on reflection, if that many people really want the orange turd back in office, maybe it’s a good thing I’m not likely to live to see the outcome.
Or as Charlie Brown used to say, “good grief!”
One sentence sticks out that I wish, as a qualitative researcher, would be unpacked:
My guess is this is with regards to inflation, but I would love to understand what policies this is referring to. Or it’s just that people don’t feel as well off as they used to (though that feels strange relative to where folks were in the midst of COVID in 2020).
It reminds me of a conversation I overheard between my son and a friend both in their early twenties and both who have recently been job searching and one of them noted that it was hard to find a job “in a recession.” I refrained from “well, actually-ing” at that moment, but had corrected my other son about that topic not that long ago. These are people who are Fox News-consuming octogenarians, but they live in a red state and there is a prevailing sense of problems with the economy (driven, in their cases, by the anxieties of the job search process).
Sticking with more anecdotes, I was at a conference with a colleague whose Ivy League graduate of a child in finance has been having similar job search woes (which rather surprised me).
I don’t think any of the 20-somethings involved in my anecdote-fest will vote for Trump, but things like this make me wonder how wide-spread these personal anxieties are, and the polling suggests pretty wide spread. And the simplism of our politics means that the only real way voters have to send a signal is via the presidential election. And so we get numbers like we are seeing.
@mattbernius:
Perception is weird. I wonder how much a lot of this is “the last time I felt normal was somewhere around 2019.” And Trump was president in 2019 and people have a weird way of forgetting things. And they are also super simplistic about how they assess politics and its results. After all, a huge majority of people think that the president directly affects gas prices.
@Steven L. Taylor: Can’t speak for your area, but out here in the PNW, “hard to find a job” is a lament about finding one that’s full-time or will pay your rent or other details like that.
In this century Dems have voted 48% or more in Nevada in a presidential year so the 41% is highly unlikely. It does make wonder about the rest of the poll. That said, Israel has created a sense of dissatisfaction among many Dems and I think Biden needs to find a better balance.
But will they vote for Biden? If they don’t vote or vote for RFK jr or something…
Which is foolish fog for a week in the Houston Ship Canal directly effects gas prices. And I doubt that has abated as Biden’s assault on US fracking and Canadian tar sands oil has likely slowed the building of US refining capability to process light sweet crude of NA so continued the dependance on heavy sour that is imported.
@JKB:
Polling so far seems to indicate that RFK Jr. is taking more votes from Trump than from Biden.
That shouldn’t be surprising–despite his liberal past and membership in the Kennedy family, his visibility over the past few years has been almost entirely in right-wing media where he was given fawning coverage for his views on vaccines, Russia/Ukraine, and other issues where he aligns much more with Republican than Democratic voters. Even on issues that helped earn him his reputation as a liberal, such as the environment, he’s been backsliding into a right-wing worldview for a while now. For example, he’s been saying that climate change hysteria mirrors Covid hysteria and that the solution can only come from the free market. He knows who his audience is now, and he’s avoided saying anything to push them away.
What’s amusing is that in the past month since he announced he was running as an indie, the right-wing media has frantically reversed themselves in their coverage of him. When he was on Hannity a few weeks ago, he was surprised that after more than a year of friendly conversations Hannity began hammering him about his past “liberal” comments. But it’s probably too late for them to change the narrative now.
Of course I don’t for a second believe that RFK will win anything in the territory of 22% of the vote (as a recent poll suggested). Third-party candidates always do a lot better in polls than on Election Day.
Oh goodie– I was going to post on this in the other daily forum. It is clear that polling new stories are clearly there to shape and influence opinion—not to provide a snapshot in time.
And lest anyone accuse me of being willfully blind–I have my stripes in our “heart’s and minds” campaign to win over the Iraqis and Afghans to the US point of view. Polls were absolutely cherry picks and engineered to shape sentiment. Why? Because the average human will use the common position of the group as their point of departure. If you can convince an individual that most people prefer Pepsi to Coke–then preferring Pepsi becomes the default they have to be shaped away from.
Possession is 9/10 of the law.
Remember the Red Wave? Crap poll after crap poll messaged throughout the media that predicted a blowout GOP takeover of the House and Senate. Guess what ACTUALLY happened.
The only reason to astroturf news around polls 1 year out– is really to opinion shape–to energize GOP voters, dispirit Dem voters, and maybe convince a Biden challenger to wade into the water to create more chaos.
I smell a rat–
My theory for quite a long time now is that we are going through a political realignment.
The second thing I’d theorize is that the focus of elites (and most of the people here on this blog) is different from most Americans.
Culture war issues and race are two big examples that elites and political hobbyists obsess over, but are low on the list of concerns of most Americans. Look at the Gallup polling on what the biggest concerns are. Compare that list to what elites – especially Democratic elites – are focusing on. You mention LGTBQ rights and young people – well look on that list to see where Americans put that.
In particular, the left wing of the Democratic party is out of step on these issues with the majority of Americans. And now we have the split in the Democratic party over Israel. And guess what, most Americans are more on the side of Israel than Hamas.
Ultimately in politics, one needs to meet voters where they are, especially given the realignment that I think is currently happening. Especially in the key states needed to win.
Update–from Politico’s story on the polls:
***The polls of 3,662 registered voters were conducted by telephone using live operators Oct. 22-Nov. 3. The margin of sampling error for each state is from 4.4 to 4.8 percentage points.
Now stop and think about how, demographically, a poll conducted in this manner is going to have a skewed result for a Democratic candidate.
This is borderline journalistic malpractice.
“In 2022, total petroleum exports were about 9.52 million barrels per day (b/d) and total petroleum imports were about 8.33 million b/d, making the United States an annual net total petroleum exporter for the third year in a row.”
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20total%20petroleum%20exports,third%20year%20in%20a%20row.
Production hit an all time high in 2022. Imports have dropped steadily since 2005.
Make it stop! Please just make it stop!
There! I got that out.
I think the comparison to Trump by anecdotes fails due to the waning memories of Trump. Because Trump is running again after a 4 year break, actual facts are irrelevant and subservient to feelings. Biden and company need to go negative on Trump. And hard. And remind Americans about the Trump years. Otherwise Trump’s gaslighting will prevail.
If Trump hasn’t been found guilty of at least one of the 91 counts he has been charged with, our judiciary system has failed to provide equal justice under the law. If the Republican Party continues to support a convicted felon Trump as the GOP nominee, our electoral system has failed as any kind of safeguard against corruption and tyranny. If the American public re-elects would-be-dictator Trump as President, our population will have chosen authoritarianism over democracy.
I’d prefer to hold out hope, but if our political systems can’t uphold the most important values we have historically celebrated in American society, then what are we losing exactly?
@just nutha:
Yes. Getting a service or retail job, especially part-time, is relatively easy.
@Andy:
Perish the thought…
Although one should expect that only American Jews, Michagan Arabs will particularly focus on this subject.
emphasis added.
The most important point.
The one thing I have learned from following here over years and USA in general is that national level political margins, analysis as if USA ran a unified state election, are nonsense. And yet that is where much – most I would hazard – journo, educated, urbanintes discourse ends up. Speaking of Youth, when in fact their understanding is biased to Uni going urban youth, illustratively.
Not of course new, I recall the stereotype historically of the Baby Boomers was a generation of hard Left leaners (this was the TV sitcom vision one got) baffled by their more conservative offspring – a mirage of course not merely from aging out of activism but mistaking a fraction, the very media visible urban and urbane Uni educated segment of an age cohort as homogenously representing an entire soi-disant generation.
I dearly hope the Democrats recalibrate and have a Swing State strategy, not a national youth delusion strategy or get out the young urban Lefties in urban areas strategy or a Latine strategy that mistakes NY latins as the national template, etc.
Swing state demographic segments that vote consistently need a pandering too or may God save us, bloody Trump returns… a chance that should bloody well motivate some strategic response.
@Jim Brown 32:
Remember rather Unskewed Polls…
Party Political activist denialism.
Some chilling polls of Trump being ahead or without touching distance is hardly something that one expects will demotivate, the smelling rat is pure party political hand-waiving
@Jim Brown 32:
I remember this from the Pepsi Challenge when I was in what became the YA reading market (so 7th or 8th grade or so). Some people felt strongly that they’d “lost” when they discovered they’d picked Coke as the best tasting; others were simply seeing if they could guess which one was Coke and didn’t prefer either.
And at places that did the challenge over large periods of time and posted their results on the tally board, preference eventually evened out to roughly 50/50 anyway. It was a cute promo, but I don’t think it had any durability that I remember.
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is another interesting thing for me when I’m musing. As I was coming out of high school, getting a job in retail led to a career–or at least steady lifelong employment. Also, there were significant numbers of decent (sometimes high) paying service jobs. I actually had one of those for 15 years. Mine was high paying because I was a mobbed-up Teamster thug (and even have a vowel on the end of my name for verification of my thug status).
Seeing increasing numbers of minority voters and even youth voters considering pulling a lever for Trump? I reminded myself that I donate to, and speak in support of, and will vote for, people and party I hope will make this country a safe and welcoming place for rising generations and for the nation’s minorities. But hell, if they want to surrender to fascism, I can’t care more about their futures than they do.
I’m a prosperous, 69 year-old White man – I’m not under any threat. I’m about as safe from political vicissitudes as one can reasonably hope to be. I have concern for my kids, but even they (aside from some youthful risky behaviors) are pretty privileged, and when we croak they’ll be doing just fine. Minorities or yutes want to vote for a White Christian nationalist party? It’s their future. After this election I’ve got two, maybe at a stretch three presidential elections to go, and then of course I’ll be off to my heavenly reward. The 22 year-old fuckwit who votes for Republicans in 2024 may have 80 years to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
@Michael Reynolds: As Andy has said, one has to meet actual vote-lever pullers where they are (and where they are specifically in their specific constiuency / geography)
Casting aspersion on their stupidity etc, while easy and even self-amusing, doesn’t get you wins really. Notably for the non-activist non-politically obsessed general population.
Socio-economic stress needs addressing in political positioning – and with attention to geographic specificity or you lose Swing States. And then you lose.
@Lounsbury: Yes, because the sample population that will answer the telephone for a number they don’t recognize…and speak with a live pollster about their voting preferences is EXACTLY representative of the demographic that will show up on election day.
You’re right, It is I not you that making no sense…
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m assuming this poll is blatant wishcasting by otherwise bored news orgs who feel the need to goose clicks and views and links to them. But my own anecdotal experiences match yours, in that this is shaping up to be a “vibes” election where people feel discontented and disassociated but can’t articulate why beyond a general sense of unhappiness with the candidates, the economy, the state of the world, etc. America seems caught in some kind of post-pandemic ennui.
@Jim Brown 32: Of course for the motivated reasoning of the party political partisan it all “makes sense” – in the same fashion as Unskewed Polls.
Everything is a plot and skewed against the Side.
In the meantime, close numbers are as much a motivator as demotivator – as like indeed failed red waves (apparently it will be impossible for most humans to actually genuinely understand probability and not treat this as magic future forecasting).
@JKB:
Two things, what does fracking and tar sands have to do with gas prices or building refineries? hay are not an ingredient in gasoline. Second why would you expect oil companies to make multi billion dollar investments in to refining capacity when they can just raise prices (or import it when the price gets really high).
What you just said make no earthly sense.
@Rick DeMent: Technically speaking, to the extent that for example fracking would (taking as a given) produce product stream to be refined on the
To make money if there is product to be refined. Importing may or may not have the same margin. Of course this is the decisioning of real investment not moustache twirling cartoon villians.
The investment of course should have a degree of confidence to not become a stranded asset, so a sourcing and time horizon of reasonable reliaibility
His claims do make some earthly sense – you did not understand them well, but they did make some sense in terms of hydrocarbons investment. Now to what extent they survive real factual scrutiny – as like tar sands producing a product stream susciptible to lead to new investment in light product… never mind his assertion on dependence. The facts questionable, the logic framework has foundation. Him being him I would expect this is extremely distorted