With just over five months away from the November election, it's time for another article about Democratic hang-wringing over Joe Biden's prospects. The president and his team insist they don't believe the polls -- even though they closely follow and scrutinize the numbers -- but according to a new article in Politico, it sure seems as though many other Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed by the overall picture painted by survey after survey. Those polling results, the piece notes, have touched off a brushfire of "pervasive fear" within Team Blue that the 2024 contest is slipping away from the incumbent, thus paving the way for a possible second Trump term in office. Perhaps the polls really are wrong. Or perhaps they're currently accurate, but will shift as the election draws closer, particularly if Trump is convicted of one or more felonies in the interim. Or maybe the landscape is simply as bleak as many Democrats fear. Regardless, as the calendar nears June, all is not well in Democratdom:
A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump. All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects...Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware...
...The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories...While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.” The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”
That's a bit too pessimistic, in my judgment, and pro-Biden sources in the story mentions a number of substantial pockets of advantage the incumbent maintains, including "Trump’s comparative lack of campaigning and infrastructure in the key states, including staff, organizing programs and advertising." The piece also quotes several Democrats expressing a belief that their attacks against 'abortion bans' will ultimately prove to be a game-changer. It's true that the Democrats' turnout and ballot operations are far more robust than what somewhat discombobulated Republicans are likely to muster, which could end up being decisive in and of itself. And Republicans being scattered on abortion policy could be a serious vulnerability for the GOP, especially with the fervently pro-abortion media emphasizing and framing the issue. That being said, the Biden camp has been trying to play to its advantages in recent weeks, spending lots of money along the way, and the return-on-investment results have thus far been...scant, at best:
Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent. And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.
That stubbornness within the data goes to the heart of my recent analysis exploring whether the core dynamics of this race are already pretty set. Asked about the polling by Politico, a Biden campaign spokesman issued a version of the old 'the only poll that counts is on on election day' chestnut employed by many trailing operations through the years: "The only metric that will define the success of this campaign is Election Day.” That is both absolutely true, and also not something a campaign necessarily wants to be saying in the late spring. The Politico story goes on, citing various Democrats voicing on-the-record and anonymous anxieties about where things stand at the moment. A few examples:
“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.” ... In the swing state of Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky suggested Biden’s standing is so tenuous that down-ballot Democrats can’t rely in November “on the top of the ticket to pull us along.” “In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections.” She said, “That’s not the case this time" ... “New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”
The piece notes a recent Siena survey of New York showing Biden only ahead of Trump by nine points in the deep blue state. I'm skeptical of that, but then again, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) only won re-election by half-a-dozen points in 2022. It's also noteworthy that "Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx." If Biden's team is spending money in New York, in May, I think that safely qualifies as sub-optimal, from their perspective. So does this:
📊 CIVIQS: Biden Job Approval (5/26)
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 28, 2024
🔵 Approve: 35%
🟠 Disapprove: 57%
—
• Arizona: 31-62 (-31)
• Nevada: 32-61 (-29)
• Georgia: 31-59 (-28)
• Pennsylvania: 33-60 (-27)
• Michigan: 34-59 (-25)
• Wisconsin: 41-53 (-12)https://t.co/ZRy14cFyTR pic.twitter.com/vs0w06Fibe
18-29 year old voter registration by this point in the cycle in Pennsylvania:
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) May 24, 2024
2020 D+16
2022 D+4
2024 R+8 https://t.co/6SUVvEFNcS
No wonder Democrats are feeling skittish about registering new voters this year. Trump holds substantial leads within the 'eligible but unregistered' demographic -- including, it appears, among younger would-be participants. I'll leave you with this snapshot of the race, as of yesterday. Coming full circle in this post, a key driving factor behind the "full-blown freakout" among Biden allies is that this doesn't look appreciably different than it has for months:
Good morning. Memorial Day has passed. It’s 160 days til Election Day. Roughly 115 days til first votes are cast. 30 days til the first debate. pic.twitter.com/f1y45SJiSp
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) May 28, 2024
As I pointed out above, this trajectory could be disrupted if Trump is convicted in New York, maybe this week. But it's interesting that in the Politico article, the Biden camp is already pre-spinning a low-to-no-impact outcome: "A Biden campaign adviser granted anonymity to speak freely stressed that the president’s team never made any indication that Trump’s hush-money trial would help — or hurt — him." We shall see.
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