Are We in The Last Days of Biden’s Reelection Campaign?
July 3, 2024
London, Wednesday evening, July 3, 2024. As warned, here is your second post of the day. There were interesting bits in the UK poll released earlier this evening, but nothing warranting an entire post. Check out the Note I posted earlier.
How do you know that Biden is a weak candidate? Trump has been keeping his mouth shut since the debate last week. Do you understand how difficult it must be for a self-promoting loud-mouth narcissist like Trump to keep quiet for days after apparently being proven correct about Biden’s capacity? It can only be because he knows only he can resurrect Biden’s chances now. There is an old adage that when your opponent is self-destructing, get out of the way and let them do it. However, it is interesting that Trump isn’t how saying that people are being unfair to Biden. Why? Because it’s clear now that there is no one he wants to run against more than Biden, so it would not be in his interest for Biden to withdraw.1
Events are moving so fast this week, I don’t feel like I can wait until I get back to the US to comment. We all know what a disaster last week’s presidential debate was for Biden. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen it - in fact it doesn’t even matter if “disaster” is a fair description of his debate performance. What matters is that Biden’s stumbles in the debate underscored a negative narrative about him among voters: that he might be too old and frail to handle another term as president. But what might matter even more is that that narrative was given life over the past few months not because of a Republican smear campaign, but because that was what even Democrats were experiencing with the president. It is starting to become apparent that some Democrats have been concerned about Biden’s capacity for some time. We are seeing right now how challenging this is for the president: the polling looks bad for him and Democrats are running away from defending him, while some are starting to publicly suggest he needs to withdraw.
Normally, after a debate one candidate experiences either a bump or drop in the polls. But it almost never is real. It’s just an initial reaction to either what they saw or how it was reported. You might remember the first debate between former President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent Sen. Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. Obama was not himself and he really flubbed it. Romney got a bump in the polling and some started calling him the front-runner. I never bought it. I don’t think Romney ever had a chance, even after that debate. But I was in the minority. Obama had good performances in the last two debates and went on to win the election by almost four points. Would Romney had won if Obama had been as lousy in the final two debates as he was in the first? Maybe, but debates are only part of campaigns. They make the most impact when one candidate says or does something that reinforces either a positive or negative narrative about themselves. This happened to Trump in the 2020 election. His rude and unpresidential behavior reminded voters whey they didn’t like him. Trump did nothing afterwards to change how voters viewed him and he lost to Biden by 4.5 points.
So maybe folks are overreacting and Biden just had a bad debate. He has time to fix it. That was his campaign’s initial reaction. But last week’s debate was different. Biden might not be able to fix this for a number of reasons. First, he proposed and agreed to two debates so there is only one more opportunity to show himself to voters in contrast to Trump. But let’s face it: Trump is never debating him again. Also, if Biden needs another debate to fix the problem it wouldn’t be until September, when it would be too late to replace him. Second, he needs to spend political capital convincing his own supporters to stay with him and he is not winning in the polls to begin with. That’s a huge lift. Third, opinions on him may be irreversible now. The concerns about him were not just that he was not up to it, but that he was too old. He is 81 and most voters have experience with family members declining in their 80s, often quickly. So this resonates with voters in a way he cannot shake. Biden cannot do anything about this; he is going to keep on getting older.
None of this would matter if voters were going to support him anyway, so let’s look at what polling we have right now.
First thing to note is that it has become clear over the past few days that if Biden withdraws the party is likely going to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Not only was that not clear a few days ago, but one of the reason so many names were being thrown out and scenarios being pondered was because of the conventional wisdom that Harris would do worse than Biden against Trump. Like so much political conventional wisdom, it was wrong. Pundits glommed onto whisper smear campaigns against Harris early in the presidency and then doubled-down on her unelectability, while ignoring how popular she was with young folks and people of color. Was that because of racism and misogyny? Maybe.
Harris has some qualities and characteristics that make her potentially a formidable candidate. She is more popular than Biden among the very groups the president needs to overperform for him, including young voters, women, and voters of color. She is 30 years younger than Biden. I don’t think I need say why that’s helpful at this point. She is a former prosecutor, something that may be beneficial in dealing with a convicted felon and all-around criminal as an opponent. She can also take credit for the popular Biden programs and advocate for them. So, considering all this, I am not going to focus on any polling for any other potential replacement candidate until such a time where that’s necessary.
There have been several polls since the election, some of which showed little change in the Biden-Trump matchup, but others showing support draining away from the president. In fact, after weeks of slowly working his way into a small lead over Trump in the 538 polling average on the eve of the debate, Trump now has a +1.6 point lead - his largest lead since early April. The debate was six days ago. I like to look at polls 7-10 days out from an event like a debate, a VP selection, or convention to see if there really has been an effect, but we are almost there and the later polling is looking worse for Biden than the immediate polling did.
CNN/SSRS released a poll this week that found Biden’s approval rating at an abysmal 36% and trailing Trump by six points (49-43). Three-quarters of Democrats say that the party would have a better chance of retaining the presidency in November without Biden. Harris trails Trump in a hypothetical match up by just two points - within the margin of error (47-45).
Data for Progress, a Democratic pollster, also released a poll this week and found that 51% of Democrats think Biden should stay in the race. However, that is a 12 point decline from a similar question in March. Biden trailed Trump by three points in this poll (48-45) - and so did Harris in a hypothetical matchup. Digging into the crosstabs, the big takeaway in my opinion is that a lot more independents (by 19 points) are concerned about Biden’s age and physical and mental health than they are about Trump’s felony conviction and threats to democracy. Even 21% of Democrats agree.
But here is the biggest polling problem that we’ve seen so far…and we were not supposed to see.
Puck Magazine published an internal poll from the Biden campaign yesterday that shows big problems for Biden in battleground states. The president has lost considerable support in 12 battleground states since the debate (roughly 2 points on average). If the election were today and those were the results, Biden would win only 203 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Additionally, it found that a replacement candidate would do better in the general election than Biden. The firm had run the same question in September 2023 and found that Biden and replacement candidates all performed essentially the same against Trump. This poll was not officially released by the campaign. Someone leaked it.
Well, that’s all I have right now. There is a lot more I did not comment on, and there will be a lot more by the time I am back from Europe. Tomorrow is the UK general election and Sunday is the second round of the French election. I don’t expect to write on US politics again until I am back in the country, but I also did not intend to write this post when I got on the plane last week.
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank responsible for Project 2025 and a lot of other terrible policy ideas, is working on a litigation strategy to prevent the Democrats from nominating another candidate. That kind of anti-democratic nonsense is on-brand for Heritage. With this current Supreme Court, who knows how things will turn out?