Nate Cohn of the NY Times wrote a little piece for a NY Times newsletter today explaining that all isn’t actually lost for Joe Biden since the race is close in the northern swing states.
Here’s the headline:
Lol. That’s nice. He also mentions this down in the piece:
Why is Mr. Biden competitive in the Northern battlegrounds? White voters and older voters.
In Times/Siena polling this year, Mr. Biden is running only about a point behind how he fared among white voters in 2020. For good measure, he’s also faring a bit better than he did among voters over 65. Other polls tell a similar story.
Mr. Biden’s resilience among white voters and older voters hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but it’s very important. White voters will make up around 70 percent of the electorate in November, and their share will be even higher in the Northern battleground states that Mr. Biden will be counting on. And voters over 65 will outnumber those under 30.
The piece is full of caveats and warnings so don’t expect the mainstream media to change their Biden Is Doomed narrative any time soon. (Cohn is their god.) But it’s interesting in any case, especially since this much longer and comprehensive piece by Ron Brownstein takes a much closer look at what this means:
For decades, Democrats have built their electoral strategies on a common assumption: the higher the turnout, the better their chances of winning. But that familiar equation may no longer apply for President Joe Biden in 2024
A wide array of polls this year shows Biden running best among Americans with the most consistent history of voting, while former President Donald Trump often displays the most strength among people who have been the least likely to vote.
These new patterns are creating challenges for each party. Trump’s potential appeal to more irregular voters, particularly younger Black and Latino men, is compelling Democrats to rethink longstanding strategies that focused on mobilizing as many younger and non-White voters as possible without worrying about their partisan allegiance. For Republicans, the challenge will be to build an organization capable of connecting with irregular voters they have not traditionally focused on reaching, particularly in minority communities.
“What all this means is this election has volatility,” says Daniel Hopkins, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has studied the widening partisan divergence between voters with and without a consistent history of turning out. “We used to expect that the marginal non-voter, the next voter who turned out if an election was very engaging, didn’t look different from people who did vote. In this case, the crowd that hasn’t gotten engaged looks very, very different.”
Brownstein looks at a number of polls that back this up focusing on one in particular that looked specifically at this phenomenon:
The results were striking. Among adults who had voted in each of the past three federal elections, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and Biden eked out a narrow advantage among voters who participated in two of the past three races. But, the poll found, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points among those who voted in just one of the past three elections and by a crushing margin of 18 percentage points among those who came out for none of them.
As important, the pattern held across racial lines. In the poll, Trump ran even with Biden among Latinos who voted in two, one or none of the past three elections, while Biden held a nearly 20-point advantage among those who voted in all three. With Black voters, Biden’s lead was just 10 points among those who did not show up for any of the past three elections, but over 80 points among those who participated in all three.
It’s about people who don’t watch the news and are apathetic about politics:
Hopkins said the gap between habitual and irregular voters in his latest survey was far greater than the difference he found when he conducted a similar poll early in the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Key to this widening chasm, he believes, may be another dynamic: Adults who are less likely to vote are also less likely to follow political news.
“For more infrequent voters, these are often people who pay less attention to politics and whose political barometer is more the question of how is my family doing economically, how does the country seem to be doing,” Hopkins said. “For those voters, Donald Trump…is not especially unusual.” By contrast, Hopkins said, a “sizable sliver” of habitual voters “have a sense that Trump may be qualitatively different than other political candidates with respect to norm violations and January 6.” For less frequent voters, he added, the equation may be as simple as “they don’t love what they see with Joe Biden, and if Donald Trump is the person running against Joe Biden, they want change.”
The NBC polling results buttress that conclusion: It found that among the roughly one-sixth of voters who say they do not follow political news, Trump led Biden by fully 2-to-1.
Ok. That’s not good news for our country. People should pay attention and should be involved in our civic life. However, this election seems to have produced a particularly apathetic electorate — it’s a re-run and a whole lot of people just aren’t interested — and the potential benefit of that is that these un-engaged citizens tend to favor Donald Trump. That could change in the next few months as people do start to tune in. But I really wonder if that’s going to happen. There is, to borrow a phrase, a malaise in the land, whether it’s due to the post pandemic hangover, Trump’s unrelenting negativity or just the uninspiring nature our polarized politics, and this looks like it may be an election of only the most engaged voters. That may very well benefit Biden who is doing unusually well with seniors and college educated voters who are the most likely to vote.
I don’t think anyone should pin their hopes on apathy. The Dems need to get every possible vote in their column just to stay even. But as Simon Rosenberg says every day, I’d rather be us than them.