Opinion The polls are inconclusive. Advantage Biden.
“President Biden and his supporters, in their push for him to remain the Democrats’ candidate, have been helped by a surprising source: the polls.
Saturday’s attempted shooting of former president Donald Trump has moved attention away from Biden’s struggles. But even before the shooting, only about two dozen of the 264 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in Congress had called for the president to step aside, despite serious private doubts in the party about Biden’s ability to win in November. The lack of a groundswell against Biden is in part because the president really wants to run and many in the party aren’t willing to sideline him against his will.
But another reason Biden can’t be dislodged easily is polling. If the president had no path to victory and another Democrat had a clear one, I suspect there would be much more momentum behind the calls for him to leave the race. But neither of those conditions exist. The president is just barely behind Trump in Michigan (3 percentage points) and Pennsylvania (less than 1 point) and effectively tied in Wisconsin, according to polling averages from The Post. (Other news organizations have slightly different averages, but they generally show very tight margins in those three states.)
Biden’s dismal debate performance and the intense criticism it drew from the media and even other Democrats didn’t result in a dramatic drop in his numbers — or really much of a drop at all. Biden was getting around 41 percent of the national popular vote (including third-party candidates) before the June 27 debate and is at 40 percent now, according to FiveThirtyEight. The partisan polarization of this era and the deep fears of a second Trump term probably insulate Biden from any huge dip in the polls. Many Americans feel they must vote for him, even if they have doubts about his physical and mental state.
So Biden right now is in a similar position to where Trump was on Election Day 2016: trailing but a potential victor if the polls are slightly understating his support in states with similar demographic and electoral histories. It’s entirely possible that Biden could sweep Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, plus win the Nebraska congressional district near Omaha, and get exactly 270 electoral votes.
Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight election model projected Trump as having a 29 percent chance of winning the 2016 election, currently has Biden at 30 percent.
Also, the election is not tomorrow, so Biden has time to gain ground. Biden is lagging behind his 2020 performance among African Americans, Latinos and voters under age 45 in particular. Those are left-leaning blocs of the electorate. It’s entirely possible that in October those voters “come home” to the Democrats, even if they don’t like the president.
So it’s pretty easy for Biden to dismiss those calling for him to leave the race when a New York Times-Siena College poll shows him down just two points in Pennsylvania; he leads by two points in a NPR-PBS News-Marist national poll; and FiveThirtyEight projects him as having essentially 50 percent odds of defeating Trump. (Silver no longer works at FiveThirtyEight. The site’s current model plays down current polls and puts more weight on past election results than other analyses, resulting in a more bullish projection for Biden.)
Another way that the polling is working in Biden’s favor is that other Democrats aren’t doing much better than him in surveys against Trump. This metric is obviously fraught. Vice President Harris, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other potential replacements for Biden haven’t had tens of millions of dollars in ads praising them, nor have they had conservatives attacking them for years. It is really hard to evaluate someone’s presidential prospects until they are actually running for president.
That said, the head-to-head polls of Harris, who is fairly well known, against Trump are fairly similar to Biden’s. If Harris were five points ahead of Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Biden would be facing much more aggressive calls to withdraw.
Finally, though some congressional Democrats are arguing that Biden dooms their electoral chances and should step aside to protect the rest of the party, the polls aren’t showing that either. Democratic U.S. Senate candidates are ahead in states where Biden trails. Polls show a very tight race for control of the House.
I don’t want to overstate my case here. The panic about Biden among Democrats is driven by polling, which suggests that if the election were today he would lose to Trump and potentially in a landslide. He could drag the entire party down to his level, giving Republicans total control in Washington next year.
Worries about Biden’s effects downballot are reportedly the concerns of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who on Wednesday called for Biden to leave the race, becoming perhaps the most high-profile member of Congress to do so.
But over the past three weeks, a series of polls showing Biden down double-digits in swing states or Whitmer substantially ahead in all of them would have doomed the president. Those polls never showed up. The president has long been publicly dismissive of polling. He might want to rethink that view. The polls allowed a man who performed worse in a general election debate than any other candidate in memory to remain in the race.“
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