(C) Tennessee Lookout
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Six months and counting until the 2024 presidential election • Tennessee Lookout [1]
['Bruce Barry', 'John Cole', 'J. Holly Mccall', 'Gabe Hart', 'More From Author', 'May']
Date: 2024-05-16
Before diving into some new presidential polling data this week that likely spiked antacid sales in Democratic precincts, it is worth emphasizing upfront that broadly speaking, the Biden-Trump battle for public favor remains very close and remarkably static. Even a cursory glance at the trend lines in polling aggregators 538 and Real Clear Politics makes it clear the national numbers aren’t shifting appreciably and haven’t for months.
But as everyone knows, national trend lines don’t decide American presidential elections; a few thousand goobers in a few dozen zip codes in a handful of states do. And so the newest round of the New York Times/Siena poll out this week, capturing registered voters in six key battleground states, has Bidenworld reaching for the Pepto.
The Times/Siena poll is “grisly news,” as The Bulwark aptly framed it, not because the head-to-head polls in battleground states are Trump forward (though they are), but because they seem to suggest that nothing Biden is doing is working. As Times polling maven Nate Cohn observes, the numbers are mostly unchanged since they last polled the battlegrounds six months ago, even as the stock market has jumped, Trump has gone on trial, and the Biden campaign has begun spending tens of millions of dollars on ads in these states.
Poll s six months before an election aren’t predictive, and for all the understandable concerns about how challenging it is to do good poll sampling these days, when you use consistent methods over time, they remain useful for tracking trends in public opinion.
Yet the most depressing thing I’ve seen this month is not the brutal Times poll, but rather the distressingly weak one-on-one interview Grandpa Joe did with Erin Burnett on CNN last week. The true believers in Biden’s camp may have watched that interview — a scant 14 minutes — and thought “OK, that was not bad, ample coherence, no glaring gaffes.” What I saw was a nerf-level softball interview, with Burnett asking anodyne questions, shying away from probing follow-ups, and repeatedly helping Biden finish thoughts — like how you chat up an elderly relative who has trouble holding up their end of a tedious conversation.
The economy was front and center in the CNN interview. When Burnett asked Biden if time is running out to turn around voter perceptions of a weak economy, Biden replied: “We’ve already turned it around. Look at the Michigan survey. Sixty-five percent of the American people think they’re in good shape economically. They think the nation’s not in good shape; they’re personally in good shape.”
Biden is right about negative takes on the national economy, with crosstabs in the Times/Siena poll offering stark (some might say dire) evidence. Asked to rate current economic conditions, only 45% of Democrats in the battleground states say “excellent “or “good,” while 54% say “only fair” or “poor.” Among Republicans 93% say the economy is lousy but you can blow that off since 93% of Republicans would rate oxygen negatively if they thought Joe Biden had some connection with it.
The dire part is independents: an alarmingly scant 16% view economic conditions as good or excellent. Of course, most who tell pollsters they are independents aren’t truly independent — three quarters when prompted admit to leaning red or blue. But if we buy the conventional wisdom (which, let’s face it, sometimes is right) that battleground moderates will tilt this election, and if 84% of self-described independents in those states see the economy as somewhere between impaired and abominable, then dire is not an overstatement.
So what about Biden’s claim that this macroeconomic cynicism masks individual optimism — the contention that voters think they are “personally in good shape”? His casual mention of “the Michigan survey” presumably refers to the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, a widely watched monthly measure that taps how consumers feel about their own finances and the economy as a whole. It’s not clear where Biden came up with the 65%-in-good-shape claim, since the Michigan number (presently in the mid-60s) is a normalized statistical index, not a percentage indicator of anything.
Biden’s timing was epically bad: in the CNN interview he cited the Michigan index as evidence that consumers are in a sunny state of mind, and then two days later the index for May came out showing a significant decline to its lowest level in six months. And by the way this decline is nonpartisan, with the pronounced dip in economic optimism shared by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.
When the going gets tough, the tough blame the messenger. “The polling data has been wrong all along,” Biden told (“told” is a euphemism for “mumbled to”) CNN’s Burnett, adding that “we have the strongest economy in the world.” (Actually he said “in the world-duh” for emphasis.) Biden seems slow to grasp that it is entirely possible for the polling to be right — to accurately tap perceptions of a weak economy — and for us to have a strong macroeconomy by many measures. I’m guessing he actually does grasp it, but he is unable to cogently and forcefully discuss it.
This would be the appropriate place to toss in the requisite acknowledgement that polls six months before an election aren’t predictive, but they do tell us what respondents think now. And for all the understandable concerns about how challenging it is to do good poll sampling these days, when you use consistent (and costly) methods over time, as Times/Siena does, they remain useful for tracking trends in public opinion. The problem isn’t that Trump leads in head-to-heads; it’s that Biden isn’t moving the needle on perceptions of his ability to handle the economy or much of anything else.
A focus on the economy does free us up to overlook some other nonsense Biden spewed in that CNN interview. For instance, he called A.I. “the most significant technological development in human history.” I suppose if A.I. ends up (as some fear) triggering the complete destruction of civilization then he might have a point. Otherwise, I’d venture that the printing press, electricity, optics, semiconductors, and antibiotics (not to mention Terro liquid ant baits) might want to get a word in edgewise.
Remember all the doubt about Biden as a viable candidate that dominated news cycles for a while last fall and winter, and the widespread musing (hoping, praying) that maybe Jill will coax him into standing down? His amped get-off-my-lawn State of the Union performance put that to rest, with assists from an unforgiving primary calendar and a party establishment that refused to even entertain the notion of a competitive contest for the Democratic nomination.
Now here we are less than six months to November, and the political commentariat is rife with ideas for how Biden might pull this campaign out of the tank. For instance, this the other day from the estimable Frank Bruni of the Times, a personal favorite of mine: “He needs to step things up — to defend his record more vigorously, make the case for his second term more concretely, project more strength and more effectively communicate” how he and Trump differ.
Bruni could be right that Biden “needs” to do these things, but the battleground polls make it clear that his record is not resonating with the very voters he needs to pull in, and the CNN interview is a telling if poignant reminder that he lacks the capacity to project strength and vigor. The agreement between Biden and Trump on a late June debate that popped out of nowhere Wednesday creates an unexpectedly early opportunity to dispel strength-and-vigor doubts. Otherwise Bidenworld is banking on immovable objects it cannot control: an unhinged opponent who might well manage to self-destruct, and a Fed that might see its way to cutting interest rates. I suppose either will do. Tick tock.
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