They shouldn’t but they do. This country is nuts.
Dan Pfeiffer analyzes the current polling and the task ahead in his newsletter today:
Last week, Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned for being part of a criminal organization that tried to illegally overturn the 2020 election. His mug shot was released and quickly went viral. Trump fumbled the COVID pandemic that cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and even more jobs; and he is personally responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade.
On the other side, President Joe Biden conducted his presidency with decency and compassion, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations of what could be achieved with a Republican Party that won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of his electoral victory. Unemployment is under 4%, the economy is growing and inflation has been coming down for months.
Yet somehow — against all common sense — the 2024 election between a competent President and an incompetent criminal — will be incredibly close.
He goes on to lay out the latest polling which shows that Trump and Biden are within a point of each other. It’s appalling. I know that Biden’s old but are people really going to allow a four-times indicted, twice impeached, lunatic to become president again? At this moment in time, that is apparently on the menu.
Pfeiffer spells out what’s going on:
1. Trump’s Holding More of His 2020 Voters than Biden
The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In the NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024. Among Biden’s 2020 voters, 2% plan to vote for Trump, 4% claim they won’t if the race is between Biden and Trump, and 5% intend to vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Trump loses 2% to Biden, 3% to another candidate, and 2% say they won’t vote.
Relying on self-reported voter history can be a little noisy, but Biden’s approval rating demonstrates that he has some work to do with his own coalition. Only 77% percent of Democrats in the poll have a favorable opinion of Biden, compared to 80% of Republicans for Trump.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I find these numbers encouraging. Convincing people who already voted for Biden to vote for him again instead of sitting out the election or throwing their vote away on a third party candidate isn’t easy, but it is doable.
I hope he’s right about that. I just can’t imagine why anyone who voted for Biden last time would think the country would be in better hands with Trump. WTF???
2. Work to Do with Young Voters
There is, of course, some overlap with the above group, but young voters are not yet as on board with Biden 2024 as they were the last time around. According to Pew, Biden won voters 18-29 by 24 points in 2020, but he is only winning them by 10 in the NYT poll. Biden won voters 30-44 by 12 points. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Times poll breaks out the age as 30-44, not 30-49, but Biden is only up three points with that group.
This change is not a bunch of young and young(ish) people deciding to support Trump. They are checking out of the election. — 9% of 18-29 year olds say they won’t vote if Biden and Trump are the nominees, and 16% of 30-44 year olds are either planning to vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.
These numbers are probably not a surprise to folks who pay attention. Young voters are a challenge for Biden. He started off the 2020 general election underperforming with that group and ended up generating high levels of turnout and support. It will take a lot of work, but Biden did it before and I am confident he can do it again.
Young people are busy with their lives and often turn off to politics. And they are idealistic and sometimes think it makes more sense to cast a protest vote to register their discontent with the system. But I suspect they will come around.
The 30-44 year olds are a bit more mystifying to me. They’ve been voting since at least 2016 and a lot of them voted for Obama. I don’t think idealism is driving this. I wonder what is?
Pfeiffer says there is also statistically insignificant move toward Trump from Black, Hispanic, Male and low-income voters and points out that the four points Biden has lost from Independents is likely because that number isn’t static and they’ve just finally admitted they are Republicans.
The big takeaways:
— Biden (and all of us) must work to reconstitute the coalition that defeated Trump in 2020;
— Biden’s (and our) task is more difficult because the anti-MAGA majority is much more diverse generationally, demographically, geographically, and ideologically than the MAGA minority;
— Communicating to younger voters Biden’s accomplishments and the stakes of this election are top priorities;
— The Biden campaign clearly understands the task ahead, which is why their current flight of ads focuses on Biden, not Trump
A viable third-party candidate like Larry Hogan or Cornell West is more damaging to Biden than Trump and could be what puts Trump over the top.
Yet another incredibly close race with the fate of democracy on the line is an unsettling and exhausting notion. It’s no fun to reflect on that prospect in the waning weeks of summer. Still, we must understand why the polling looks the way it does and formulate a strategy for how to invest our time and resources as the campaign heats up this fall.
Here’s an example of the ads that are currently being run by the Biden campaign. I see them a lot on the news channels. I have no idea if they’re penetrating the groups that need shoring up: